


Intent on Its Angles

by the_rck



Series: Not Ready to Swallow Oblivion [1]
Category: Sky High (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Captivity, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Suicide, Telepathic child abuse, Unreliable Narrator, Villain Warren Peace
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-18 05:52:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14847009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: Layla kind of hated having to hope that all Warren wanted was pets because that meant admitting that it was up to him. Everything that happened-- or didn’t-- was at the whim of a fifteen year old boy who’d decided he wanted them based on a week’s acquaintance.She supposed it wouldn’t matter much to her or her friends if Warren destroyed them accidentally or deliberately, just how much it hurt getting there.





	1. Warren: That Dares Not Grasp the Thorn

**Author's Note:**

> Past psychic child abuse. Threatened violence. 14 year olds thinking about sex, suicide, and murder. Actual but non-graphic and off-screen murder.
> 
> Story title from Derek Walcott's "Cul de Sac Valley."
> 
> An annotated index to the series can be found here: https://somethingdarker.dreamwidth.org/65198.html
> 
> This series has gotten very long. The other parts of the series diverge from this story after the end of the chapter named "Brave at the Shore" but do assume that readers know what happened it this story. This story is complete in itself and represents the happier outcome for most of the characters.
> 
> I fully expected, when I started writing this, that it would be about 3K words long. At this point, I've got five chaptered stories in an arc. They are all written, but some are still to be edited.
> 
> Will doesn't appear until late in the story. I listed him as a character because he gets a POV chapter of almost 5000 words.
> 
> Thanks to Karios, Elizabeth_Culmer, and hopeofdawn for beta reading.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Anne Bronte's "The Narrow Way."
> 
> I think this chapter is pretty clear about Warren having been abused. That doesn't excuse his choices over the course of the entire arc but does, I think, explain them. The abuse was telepathic/mind control related rather than physical or sexual, but it might be triggering or otherwise upsetting for some readers. Most future chapters will be from other points of view, but there will be occasional Warren POV chapters over the course of the series (currently five multi-chapter stories).

Warren had used every bit of his understanding of his mother to persuade her that Sky High would be the best present ever. He’d had the idea as soon as Gwen approached him about talking to his father. 

He’d only had to give his mother small pushes to get it to snowball to the point of staff and a long term mission. His mother liked the idea of indoctrinated minions but found children too much work. She also loved Warren and wanted him somewhere where he wouldn’t be in harm’s way.

It was concern for him. She always said that. It wasn’t that even almost grown children were a lot of work or that grown children-- particularly those raised as Warren had been-- might be dangerous. She’d made sure that Warren could never be dangerous to her. Anything that got close shut down his mind, so he didn’t go there.

Except when-- He didn’t go there. As long as he knew he wasn’t going there, he could still do a lot of things. As long as it wasn’t going to be dangerous for his mother.

Warren was very careful never to need too much from his mother. Needing too much tended to make her redefine what he was allowed to do. Warren’s life would be so much less of a tightrope walk when he and his mother were farther apart. 

He was pretty sure that the skills he’d learned in dealing with his mother would transfer to handling other people. He’d tested that more than a few times, always on people his mother didn’t care about, so that she wouldn’t notice if he made a mess. 

If Warren ever screwed up, his mother would still choose him over anyone else because he was hers. She cared about him more than she did about anyone else. She’d go out of her way-- a little-- to protect him and indulge him.

He might lose some memories. The maze of musts and can’ts in his head might get tighter and harder to navigate. He’d live, though, because she knew that mothers love their children. 

Anyone else-- even Warren’s father-- who pissed her off would die.

Warren was a little surprised that he was looking forward to Homecoming for the event as much as for what would come after. He knew that part of it was the potential freedom to make choices. He’d been looking for an opportunity for years, and Gwen Grayson had given him a beautiful one. After Warren introduced Gwen to his mother, it was all easy. He had a little more than a week before Homecoming with all his decisions his own. 

After Homecoming? Well, holding onto his freedom would be a game beyond worth playing.

Meeting Layla was entirely a matter of chance, but the timing was so absolutely perfect that he took a risk.

Before his mother had left to set things up, she’d told him to find someone pretty and harmless as his date to the dance; otherwise, she’d said, him going at all would stand out too much. He wasn’t known for being social at school. Or anywhere else. A date would cover that.

Layla wanted a date to Homecoming. He hadn’t even had to ask her. She’d just announced it.

His mother had always told him to avoid relationships that might make him vulnerable, so Warren didn’t try to like people. He studied people; he played people; he used people. Even the people he kissed. Not that there had been many of those. His mother took a lot of interest in that. 

Caring about anyone except his parents would be disobedience, so he wasn’t going to love Layla. He couldn’t, not unless he found the right gap in his mind or persuaded his mother to allow it. 

His mother had told him not to get attached and set the fences in his mind to keep him from trying. People weren’t supposed to work that way, but he had to because that was one of walls she’d put in his head. She bricked up any gaps when she found them, so he was careful not to let her find them. She couldn’t see his thoughts, just what he did.

This situation, though--he could take this as permission to talk to people in a way that wasn’t just about how useful people would be later on. There was room in his head that he hadn’t had before. He had to be charming enough for people to believe that someone pretty and harmless would choose him. He could do that. 

Actually liking Layla helped. He’d decided right away that he was going to keep her. He hadn’t expected her friends, but what worked for one could work for four. Layla’d be more stable with company. Warren was going to be busy for a while after Homecoming.

They were all so very fearless and innocent that he envied them. Neither quality would last, and he-- almost-- regretted it. He assumed that they had more to them than what he was seeing. Not powers-- they were sidekicks-- but maybe something else, something interesting.

Wanting to keep them had nothing at all to do with the way they had welcomed him into their group. It was only that Layla was harmless enough and pretty enough to fit his mother’s instructions. Only that.

The idea of protecting and keeping Layla and her friends was a whim, a game. Because Layla was pretty. At least, that was what he could tell his parents. Later. Either the quartet would really turn out to be harmless and helpless, and it wouldn’t matter at all, or they’d surprise him.

Just him. He wasn’t trying to surprise anyone else.

He suspected that his mother wouldn’t consider Layla Williams harmless, but Layla in no way fell into a category his mother had forbidden, so he was fairly certain that his mother would believe that he had missed what it meant that Layla’s mother was a superhero rather than a sidekick. He could fit the idea that Layla was harmless through the gaps his mother had left, and his mother would never realize he’d done it deliberately.

Doing it deliberately didn’t constitute disobedience. Doing it deliberately didn’t even go close to any specific compulsions, bans, or instructions, not any more. Having it be his choice, entirely his choice, felt like flying.

Warren would never admit to understanding that Layla might know more than another random freshman sidekick or that her mother might attempt to get her back. Neither of those things were dangers to Warren’s mother. Possibly, they might be dangers to Warren if he mismanaged things, but he was allowed to risk himself.

Warren’s mother thought that Warren made mistakes but that those were harmless to her because they always had been.

Layla was so very vulnerable that Warren hadn’t had to do much to benefit from Will Stronghold’s foolishness. That aspect would please his mother; the part about Will, not the part about Layla’s vulnerability. Warren was very certain he’d hear glee in his mother’s voice when he told her. He could spin it right, tell her that, by the time Will realized that Gwen was playing with him, Warren had already ensnared Will’s girl.

Keeping Layla was a thing of which Warren’s mother would approve entirely because a Stronghold had wanted her. That Layla was also a gift Warren’s mother could give him would appeal, too, but it was the Stronghold connection that would outweigh any consideration of risks.

None of the Strongholds would matter in the slightest after Royal Pain made her move.

None of the quartet of sidekicks were going to be happy with him. He kind of vaguely regretted that, but it wasn’t as if there were better paths, not for him. They weren’t all going to sit in a field, making daisy chains and singing songs. They were going to a dance, and some time in the middle of it, Gwen Grayson was going to eliminate a number of members of the up and coming generation of elite supers.

Gwen was going to take care of Warren’s mother’s problems with Jetstream. Warren hadn’t been looking forward to figuring out how to kill Jetstream, but he’d always known he’d have to. Now, Gwen was taking that on, instead.

A baby girl with a different name-- very definitely not Josie-- would find a home in Warren’s nursery. The baby would be no threat at all to Warren’s mother. Warren would find a way to deal with it when the adolescent girl showed powers. It wasn’t as if anyone but Warren would know that the girl who could fly-- Candace? Diana? Eileen? --was also immune to Warren’s mother’s powers.

Warren was being kind. He wasn’t concealing a weapon to use against his mother. He couldn’t do that, but he could be just a little bit kind.

Warren’s father would be sorry not to get to fight the Commander again, but what Warren’s father wanted mattered less than what Warren’s mother wanted. Warren wasn’t even absolutely sure his father was real. He might just be a dream Warren and his mother shared. Barron Battle was everything Warren’s mother wanted, but she was too afraid of risk to take the hand he kept offering.

Warren suspected that Barron Battle only kept offering because Warren’s mother had set a wall in his father’s head. Warren wouldn’t ever ask his father about it because that might get his mother killed. Even if Warren’s father couldn’t do that or couldn’t want that, someone would. There were ways through or around most walls.

Gwen hadn’t had the slightest suspicion what Warren’s mother could do, and Warren hadn’t even tried to warn her. If Gwen wanted to swim with the sharks, she’d have to learn to be more careful. Warren had managed.

Warren’s mother had always told him not to make friends with heroes, not with people who might be powerful enough to see his weaknesses and exploit them. She hadn’t been very specific, not enough to stop him from getting a little attached to the quartet of sidekicks once he had a loophole that let him talk to them. They clearly weren’t heroes, after all. They might be capable of seeing weaknesses. A lot of people could. Warren had learned that early, but he’d also learned that most people had no idea how to exploit weaknesses.

He could convince himself that these four would never have a way to use what they saw against him.

Spending time with them was so very close to having friends. If he could keep them, he could keep that. More or less. He’d give them Lima if they gave him Stockholm. All four of them were smart enough for that.

As long as Warren didn’t let them exploit his weaknesses, as long as they were an experiment or a whim, he was still being obedient to his mother’s stated wishes. He was being careful about the precise edges and limits of her words because knowing that he was deliberately disobeying-- His mind wouldn’t allow the idea of ‘deliberately’ in conjunction with ‘disobeying.’

He could consider rebelling. He could pretend he wasn’t doing it while aiming precisely at the holes in the walls around his will. It wasn’t disobedience if he didn’t think it was.

He was pretty sure he could get the right words from his mother, later, to let him keep all four of them as long as he still wanted them. He understood what his mother wanted and what she thought she ought to want. He understood that he was on the edge of becoming useful to his mother and that two steps beyond that would tip him over into active threat territory. The space between wasn’t anywhere he could stay.

So he needed to draw as little of her attention as he could. He needed a foolish side project. Maybe she’d get used to him being far away. Maybe she’d like power now that she’d decided to seize it.

Maybe she’d die in her sleep, and he’d be free.

Warren desperately wanted that part of his string of maybes to be real.

******

**Saturday 29 October 2005 - Homecoming**

The punch was terrible. It tasted like someone had tried to get juice to ferment and only gotten it to sour. Vinegar and alcohol weren’t remotely the same thing. Warren wondered which of the students present had made that mistake.

Then again, Medulla might think it was funny. 

No, Medulla would certainly think it was funny.

Warren definitely wasn’t keeping Medulla. His mother had given him a list of who she thought he needed to keep after Royal Pain started transforming people. She’d even authorized money to pay nannies, so Warren had the option to keep those babies alive. 

Medulla was on the list, but Warren suspected that Medulla’s powers might resist mental regression. Keeping Medulla meant war as soon as Medulla regained control enough of his body or actually learned that being a condescending ass didn’t make people want to help him.

Physical control was more likely. Warren really didn’t want a running war with a Technopath the size of toddler.

And Gwen almost liked Medulla. He wasn’t going to be in any particular extra danger from her. Some of the others would, and Warren thought some of those others might be useful to him later on. One baby looked a hell of a lot like another, so he could just change names. Up to a point.

Finding the loopholes in his mother’s instructions in order not to keep Medulla had given Warren enough space to do a few other things. She’d made everything conditional, up to his judgment. “As feasible. Don’t take big risks for any of them.” 

That made anything at all possible. ‘Feasible,’ ‘big,’ and ‘risks’ were very open to interpretation. Warren had a very carefully selected list of who he was going to keep and what names from his mother’s list were going to go on the nametags.

When the dance started, the Commander and Jetstream weren’t the only non-teacher superheroes present. Warren didn’t know what lies Gwen had told to lure the others there or if his parents had pulled some strings. He just knew that there was something in the drinks being offered to the adults, something beyond the alcohol, something that would slow them down when the time came.

Penny and her duplicates were watching everything and tracking who drank, who didn’t, and how much. One of the set stayed near Gwen and kept her up-to-date.

Warren had already noticed that Coach Boomer was drinking from his own flask. The Coach could be a problem; his power could be used spherically and actually worked better in an enclosed space. The walls contained the sound and echoed it back. In a really good auditorium, the Coach could kill the entire audience and everyone backstage.

Warren managed to get his almost-friends into a corner before Gwen started her speech. He wanted to limit their ability to flee, not because they could escape but because, if they weren’t clearly in a space he controlled, Gwen might forget-- or ‘forget’-- that they were his. Her anger at Will was still radioactive and probably visible from space.

Magenta and Ethan both noticed that Warren intimidated other students into letting them have his selected space. Layla didn’t notice; she was too busy feeling miserable about Will not being there. Zach was too busy with trying to figure out if he had a chance with Magenta.

Magenta smiled at Warren, and Ethan started to look wary.

Warren would have to remember that Ethan was smart.

Then Gwen was talking. Then Gwen was shooting. Then people regressed into wailing infants.

“Get behind me,” Warren told the sidekicks. He stepped forward, ignited his hands, and spread his arms wide.

Five of his mother’s people, ones Warren almost trusted, came into the room. They were wearing kevlar and carrying some sub-type of AK-47. Warren’s father said that guns made better crowd control threats than superpowers, because the people being threatened knew exactly what guns could do. 

“Warren--” Ethan started.

Warren never found out what Ethan was going to say because Coach Boomer ignored the flames on Warren’s hands and grabbed Warren’s shoulder. “Get them out of here! I’ll cover for you!” he ordered.

Warren hadn’t been planning to keep Boomer, but that moment changed his mind.

Boomer was an infant less than ten seconds later. It might have been long enough for them to get out. 

If Warren had had any reason to want to. 

Warren kind of thought that his soon-to-be prisoners needed to see what happened to everyone else. They needed to be scared shitless. They needed to understand how bad things could be and that how bad things got for them was up something he would choose. 

He’d offer a carrot-- probably more than one-- later; for now, he wanted them to understand the stick.

Magenta actually punched Warren in the back several times. That told him that she understood that he had trapped rather than shielded them. She wasn’t doing it from panic; she was doing it because she didn’t have any other way to make him move.

She only stopped when one of his armed minions strolled over, met her eyes, and then very carefully took aim at her head. At that range, there wouldn’t be much left.

“Alive,” Warren growled. “I don’t mind injured, but I want alive.” He let his voice soften a little as he addressed the group behind him. “Up to a point, guys. You give me too much shit, and you can have your choice of bullets or Royal Pain.” Wanting them to be real didn’t mean he’d be stupid about it.

All four of them went completely still. When they moved again, it was to put themselves as much behind the cover offered by his body as they could.

Warren smiled. He’d known they were all pragmatic enough to choose to live.

Warren only found out, after, that Zach and Ethan had almost managed to get the grate off the air duct behind them. There had been too much screaming for Warren hear them working. His sense of their body heat had told him that they were crouched near the wall. He’d just assumed they were terrified and trying to be smaller targets.

Being terrified fit what he’d thought he knew about them, and Magenta had been punching him. That had kind of kept his mind on other things. Distraction actually made more sense as a ploy than trying to make him move by beating on him. Warren’s respect for Magenta’s intelligence went up.

Knowing that they’d tried to escape made Warren like Zach, Magenta, and Ethan quite a lot better. That they hadn’t needed to discuss it in order to work together made him want to be inside their group more. He’d never had that with anyone.

He was only a little disappointed that Layla hadn’t helped. She was still pretty, though, and Warren wouldn’t abandon her for being helpless in the face of watching her world fall apart.

Warren didn’t realize until much, much later that that aimed gun had also stopped Layla. He’d been very, very mistaken when he assumed that she’d simply frozen in terror. 

The floral decorations had looked very peculiar after everything was done. Warren had simply assumed, on seeing them, that it was the result of powers exercised by someone he didn’t know anything about. The school database being gone meant he couldn’t check, but it didn’t matter.

Plant manipulation wasn’t a sidekick power, so obviously either whoever had done it worked for Gwen or was now a baby. Also, Warren hadn’t been 100% sure what the flowers had looked like earlier in the evening. He’d been paying attention to other things. Maybe Gwen had wanted something weird and twisted and pretty for her big night.

Nobody noticed the damage to the school’s foundations until three weeks after Homecoming. At that point, there was no reason to connect it to that night or to his prisoners. The damage must have been pretty bad, though, because the foundation self-repaired and hadn’t yet erased the evidence of plant roots trying to find their way through.

His mother never asked, so he never needed to explain why he’d missed the connection. He wasn’t sure whether no one told her or whether she put it down to him being a borderline fuckup. Meeting low expectations was so much easier than trying to impress her ever had been, and it covered all of Warren’s of sins of independence.

Or maybe Warren just didn’t remember the times when it hadn’t. That was possible, beyond possible, but it would mean things were missing from his diaries. He checked those for gaps in coverage. Regularly. He had backups for his backups.

Gwen was actually a really good shot with the Pacifier. She also knew which targets were the most dangerous and most likely to escape. With that, her father’s allies, and Warren’s mother’s people covering the exits, no one was getting out of the building. Hunting down the last few would take a while, but the outcome was never in doubt.

In the end, the only one they didn’t catch was a junior who could shrink. She never turned up anywhere else after, so Gwen assumed the girl had gone subatomic and couldn’t get back. Warren supposed that could explain it, but he always wondered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have drafts of everything I expect to post and just need to complete the editing. How fast I post the rest of this will depend on scheduling for me and my beta readers. The total word count is currently about 94K and will probably go over 100K, and that means a lot of time for the process of getting a chapter ready.


	2. Layla: No Stronger Than a Flower

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from William Shakespeare's “Sonnet 65.”
> 
> I started this chapter first and only realized later that, yes, I really did need to explain Homecoming.

**Saturday, 29 October 2005: Homecoming**

The girls’ locker room only had one human sized way in or out. Magenta could get out through the ducts, and there might be a way she could take Ethan’s oil slick form along, but neither Zach nor Layla could manage that. Also, as Magenta pointed out, escaping the locker room was a long way from escaping Sky High. None of them were desperate enough to jump, not when they still didn’t know why they’d been spared.

The odds of learning to fly on the way down weren’t that great.

On the positive side, they had water and a bit of food looted from the student lockers. It wasn’t anything Layla would want to try to live on long term, but she was pretty sure Warren didn’t intend them to starve. He’d put too much effort into keeping them alive and adolescent to forget them to that extent.

She rubbed her hands on her skirt. “Give it a few hours,” she said. “Then, it’ll make sense to--” She choked on the words.

Magenta nodded as if Layla had completed the sentence. “I can do that. If you guys cover for me, nobody who just looks in will know I’m gone.” She looked down at the water bottle they’d found in the office, one that might be big enough for Ethan and that might be something she could move while in her other form. “Two people would be faster, but…” She shrugged.

“Harder to hide on this end,” Ethan finished.

Layla wanted very badly to go into a toilet stall to cry and equally badly to use her powers to rip something-- someone-- to pieces. She was pretty sure that anger and terror would give her enough energy to destroy the aerial island on which they stood. Sky High wasn’t small, but it wasn’t all that big either.

It was just that the not being able to fly part would still be a problem.

They ended up sleeping in the empty office that was part of the locker room because it had enough open floor space for them all to be together. The only other part of the place that was big enough was the shower, and none of them liked that option. At least the office floor was dry.

And the office had a door they could shut and the light switches for all sections of the locker room. The door wouldn’t stop Warren, of course-- it probably wouldn’t stop a determined toddler-- but they all felt better with it closed.

None of them really slept. The floor was hard and cold, and they were all just trying to fill time until-- Until whatever happened next.

Layla distracted herself from her worries about their situation by worrying about Will. Then, she distracted herself from that by wondering whether she could manage to manipulate mold and mildew. She could sense both in the locker room, neither in large quantities, but she’d never tried working with something like that. They weren’t technically plants, either, which might or might not mean something. Powers didn’t always follow science dictated lines.

 

**Sunday, 30 October 2005**

Magenta had been out and back three times before Warren stopped by. She hadn’t seen nearly as many people as they’d expected, but those she did see were visibly armed and armored. At least half of the buses were gone.

Layla, Ethan, and Zach had several different plans for covering for her absence, starting from saying and doing nothing to draw attention to where she wasn’t and ending with full blown claiming she’d never been there at all on the theory that hiding her future presence would be easier than hiding her present absence, but they were all three relieved not to have to.

All four of them heard the door unlock so they had enough time to get into place. 

Layla stepped out from where she’d been sitting between rows of lockers so that she’d be clearly visible from the door. She folded her arms across her chest and stared at where Warren would be.

Zach flushed a toilet and emerged from the stall to wash his hands. Like Layla, he was in full view of the door.

Ethan waited long enough for Warren to get inside then leaned around a row of lockers to look at him before ducking back out of sight.

Once the sound of the flushing toilet had faded, Magenta made an audible noise of disgust and rejection. She stayed out of sight. They hoped to get Warren used to not seeing her.

Warren took three steps into the room which put him right by the office door. He glanced over his shoulder and nodded.

The door closed behind him.

Warren smiled, and for the briefest moment, Layla could pretend it was all a mistake. “It’s not as bad in here as I thought it might be.” He sounded pleased about that. “There really aren’t many good places to put you, not yet.” He shrugged with one shoulder, and his voice got harder as he said, “I can make this shittier, and I will if I have to.”

Magenta made a scoffing noise.

Layla nodded but didn’t respond otherwise. Anything she might say would give Warren an opening. She heard Zach’s shoes on the floor as he walked up to stand just behind her. They hadn’t discussed it, but she thought that Zach understood that the two of them were playing target because they were the two who absolutely needed the door to be able to get out.

As long as they weren’t hurt, Ethan and Magenta could-- would-- take to the air ducts if Warren wanted to torture or kill. They might not survive long, but they also might.

Warren fidgeted. “Are we going to fight?” His hands clenched and started to spark.

“We'd lose,” Layla replied flatly. Even she would. Plants were sadly flammable. She'd have to get him with something that produced toxic smoke. That would require thought, and she probably didn’t have the right seeds on her to grow something strong, not with no dirt or sun. She should have planned for that.

Warren relaxed a little.

Layla took her first deep breath since the lock had clicked open. She hadn't been sure she wouldn't die. “None of us are suicidal.” She left the 'you utter asshole’ part implied.

Warren shrugged. “I'm not asking you to like it, just to remember that I'm standing between you and Royal Pain. I don't have to if any of you actually want that.”

Zach made a scoffing sound. “She said we're not suicidal. We're also picky about who we'll work for. Not for Gwen. Not for you.”

Layla knew they might not be able to hold that line. She wasn't sure the others did.

Warren didn't look surprised. “Wasn't planning to ask that. If you offered… I'm not that sort of fool.” He looked over Layla's head, and it took her a moment to realize that he couldn't meet her eyes.

Warren wanted them to offer. Warren wanted them to choose him because they liked him.

Layla didn't let her expression change. She still hoped for rescue, but hope didn't always go anywhere useful. “Food is necessary,” she said because it was and because it backed away from choices and from what Warren wanted. “Toilet paper. Clean clothes and towels. Bedding.”

She wasn't going to ask how long they'd be imprisoned. She wasn't going to ask about Will. The answers were too likely to hurt.

“Food’s easy. I’m pretty sure we’ve got extra toilet paper,” Warren said. “We can wash clothes and towels.” Now he looked directly at Layla. “If you haven't tossed the lockers, I overestimated you.”

“Some of them are locked,” Ethan said.

That was a gamble because they'd gotten through some of the locks. Having Warren know they could do that seemed like a bad idea. He'd be much more likely to trust the door if he didn't know they could open locks.

He'd put a guard outside the night before.

Layla'd noticed that Warren had more minions than Gwen did and that his actually knew what they were doing. 

Gwen's people thought they had won a game; Warren's people knew that this was just the first battle.

Layla had no doubts whatsoever that those people would hurt or kill her if they thought she was a risk. Her main question was which of Warren’s parents was paying the bills and pulling the strings.

No, her main question was whether or not whichever one of them it was would let Warren keep four sidekicks as pets. She couldn’t think of anything Warren gained by keeping them which meant that there probably wasn’t anything in it for his parents either.

Layla was putting money on Warren’s mother as the mastermind. Barron Battle had never even exchanged a greeting with subtlety.

Warren left shortly after that. He told them that he’d send someone with food as soon as he could and that that person would take away anything they wanted washed. He didn’t promise bedding, though, which made Layla wonder what everyone else was sleeping on. They were a lot more likely to be able to do something hostile with utensils for eating, after all, than they were with blankets and pillows.

*****

Someone, probably Warren, had remembered that Layla was a vegetarian. The food wasn’t actually good, but it was plentiful, and some of it would keep if set aside for later. The four of them didn’t even need to discuss that. They simply did it. 

Ethan tested getting into and out of the water bottle. The biggest problem was targeting. He’d never tried making his puddle self fit a specific volume. Once he got that part right, he actually fit inside the bottle.

Magenta practiced moving the water bottle while it was empty and then while it was filled with things that weren’t Ethan. Later, once she could manage corners when it was full of water, they tried with Ethan actually in the bottle. He complained afterward that it made him dizzy to roll around like that, but they all knew that he could do it if he had to.

Layla sat in the shower area and meditated, trying to see if she could make anything grow. She got a little fungus and some algae, but the mold and mildew remained out of reach. She thought she might be getting closer, but she really had no idea how to measure that.

Also, she reminded herself, with something like this, a miss was as good as a mile. She might hit directly later and still find she couldn’t do anything useful. She didn’t know much about mold and mildew-- not even how they were different except that they were-- or what they might be able to do. They were just everywhere; Warren would have to put her in a clean room in order to keep her from touching them.

If she could ever figure out how.

With help from Ethan and Magenta, Zach sorted through the things they’d pulled out of lockers. He made four piles. The first held all the towels and any article of clothing he found that might possibly fit one of them. The second held all other clothing. The third was toiletries, water bottles, and food. The last was everything else.

The pile of everything else was surprisingly large, and Layla’s friends spent a while trying to figure out which of their classmates had owned what, working from the assumption that most the items were somehow useful for practicing powers. Well, useful for _something_ , anyway.

Zach eventually started reading aloud from one of the six books they’d found. Layla wasn’t listening closely enough to catch the title or even genre, but it was sort of soothing to have a steady voice filling their prison.

Later, they tried to figure out which of the odd items could be useful in helping them escape. Layla came back into the main part of the room, then, so that she could participate. Some of their ideas got wildly silly, and having a chance to laugh at something helped more than getting food had.

After another meal which was accompanied by a pickup of things the prisoners wanted washed and of the dishes from the previous meal, the four prisoners tried to sleep again. This time, Layla was tired enough to sleep a little. She dreamed fear and fighting. She dreamed that the locker room turned into a maze with unexplored depths. She kept half waking then having her exhaustion pull her back under.

 

**Monday, 31 October 2005**

They were awakened by the arrival of more food, clean towels, and some clothes that almost fit. Layla and Magenta showered first while Zach and Ethan sat in the office. Once the girls were dressed, they sat in the office so that the boys could have the same privacy. All four of them felt a little better just being clean.

They spent the rest of the time before their next meal memorizing the locations Magenta had found for accessing the ducts in the non-locker room parts of the school. If Warren left them in the locker room, if it remained feasible, Magenta would slowly move some of their potentially useful things-- dubiously useful, they all knew, but they had what they had-- to those points. Ideally, any one of them would be able to retrieve a cache if they ever escaped.

If nothing else, it might keep Ethan and Magenta fed for a while as they played potentially lethal hide and seek with Warren’s people.

Warren stopped by again, briefly, after the second meal of the day.

Magenta stayed out of his line of sight again. 

Warren stepped inside, looked at Layla, Ethan, and Zach appraisingly, and nodded. “Good,” he said. He turned to leave then added, “I’ll have time to actually talk tomorrow or the next day.”

Just before the door shut behind Warren, Magenta spoke for all of them. “Don’t think we’re going to forgive you.” There was enough venom in the words that Warren had to realize how angry she was.

Warren kept the door open a moment longer. “I know. I also know that not one of you is stupid.”

Magenta wasn’t there when the third meal arrived, but the man and woman who brought it didn’t try to take a headcount. They just put the trays on the floor, took the old trays away, and kicked the dirty laundry out of the room.

Magenta came back twenty minutes later. “There’s still a guard outside the door,” she said as soon as Zach had given her the all clear and then helped her to the floor. She could transform while falling between duct and floor; she’d tested that several times while the rest of them watched so that they could catch her if she failed.

It only took once for everything to go wrong. Layla was pretty sure that she wasn’t the only one who prayed when Magenta was out for longer than expected. Magenta kept saying that she was being careful and staying in the ducts, but the information she was bringing back wasn’t limited to things that could be seen and heard through vents.

Layla hadn’t been willing to challenge Magenta on the subject. Magenta being able to do so much, to learn so much, was really the only thing keeping Zach and Ethan from clawing at the walls.

She wondered if Warren was leaving them so isolated for psychological effect. It would be a smart villain move, even if he wasn’t really busy, because the helplessness and the not knowing anything about what was happening would erode their defenses eventually. He didn’t know they had a guinea pig.

She tried to take comfort in knowing that destroying them didn’t seem to be part of the plan. It could still happen. They could be separated. They could be tortured. If Warren really didn’t have time to deal with them right now, it might mean that things would change when he did have time.

She kind of hated having to hope that all he wanted was pets because that meant admitting that it was up to him. Everything that happened-- or didn’t-- was at the whim of a fifteen year old boy who’d decided he wanted them based on a week’s acquaintance.

She supposed it wouldn’t matter much to her or her friends if Warren destroyed them accidentally or deliberately, just how much it hurt getting there.

 

**Thursday, 3 November 2005**

Judging by the meal schedule and by Magenta’s reports on when it got dark, it was three days before Warren returned. Magenta thought that Warren actually was busy. His people were searching the building, and she actually had to work at avoiding being spotted. They were also bringing in supplies and making alterations to the building.

By the time Warren visited again, all four of them were snapping at each other. Ethan had taken to turning on the showers, just for the noise. If they were all quiet enough, that let each of them pretend to have privacy for a while.

Layla was pretty sure she wasn’t the only one who cried in the shower. None of them had shared shower time since that very first day, so she couldn’t be sure without asking. Asking would have meant admitting that she did it.

Zach kept reading out loud, but they were rationing the books. Also, he wouldn’t do it if Magenta wasn’t there. Both of those things made the bits of story high points of the day, better than meals or showers.

Layla had confined her experiments with growing things to one corner of the large shower area. Given that the facilities were meant to let at least twenty girls all shower at the same time, there was plenty of space for everyone to avoid going near that area, which smelled like it badly needed bleach and looked as if touching it might be actively dangerous. She’d never told the others what her power was, and she didn’t say it now, just demonstrated, while they watched, by making the algae get noticeably thicker. “I’m trying,” she told them. “I can’t find much, but I’m working on it.”

Not one of them complained. Not one of them mentioned how much time she spent sitting in there and staring at the air. Layla was grateful for that because it let her think about something other than how helpless she was.

This time, when Warren came, Magenta wasn’t there, but he didn’t show any sign of noticing her absence. He came further into the locker room than he had on either previous visit, seven steps inside instead of three. He looked wary but determined.

Layla had to force herself not to step back when he came closer than she’d expected. Even having Zach and Ethan with her didn’t help as much as she’d hoped.

Warren went still for a moment. “I would if I had to,” he said softly, “but it’s not something I’m planning on doing for the hell of it.” He could, though, and his face told Layla that he knew it and that it wouldn’t bother him much.

She waited a moment then nodded. It was more acknowledgment of the words and of the possibilities than of belief in his good intentions. They’d all be safer if he meant well, but it would also make remembering what he was a hell of a lot harder. She let her shoulders sag a little as if she were already having trouble finding the energy to keep fighting. Then she forced herself straight as if she’d realized that she’d accidentally shown a weakness.

Warren had noticed. Layla was certain he’d noticed. His expression softened a little. His eyes moved from her face to Ethan’s and then to Zach’s. “This is better than the other options,” he said. “The detention rooms don’t have showers. The classrooms… There’d have to be people inside with you all the time instead of outside the door.” He inhaled and wrinkled his nose. “And it smells better in here than in the boys’ locker room.” He didn’t sound altogether certain about that last point.

Layla supposed they’d all just gotten used to the odor of the things growing in the showers. She hoped Warren didn’t offer to send someone in to clean. Hiding the evidence would be… challenging.

She was almost certain that the real reason they were in the girls’ locker room instead of the boys’ was that Coach Boomer’s office might hold things they could use to fight or to escape.

“How long are you going to keep us locked in here?” Zach asked.

Layla started a little because she hadn’t expected Zach or Ethan to say anything.

“That depends on you,” Warren replied. “Keeping you in here is mostly so that you don’t get hurt. There’s no way off the rock, not for you, not unless I decide to let you leave.”

Layla did her best to give Warren a deer in the headlights look as she concluded that, yes, leaving them trapped in the locker room had been as much about making them feel helpless as it had been about keeping them out of the way. She licked her lips. “What do you want us to do?” She released the words as the barest whisper.

He expected the question, after all. It was the one he wanted, the one he was prepared to answer. He didn’t need to hear the words.

Ethan put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “We’re getting sick of the space.”

Layla glanced back as Ethan spoke and saw him wave one hand to indicate the entire locker room.

“We’re sidekicks,” Ethan went on. “Getting captured is part of the job.” He shrugged. “The hero’s supposed to come a hell of a lot sooner than this.” His voice carried a certain resigned realization that, this time, the hero wasn’t coming.

Layla hoped that was fake. It had to be.

“‘Hero’ is a matter of definitions,” Warren said. “Of perspectives.”

Warren’s words made Layla feel better, just not for the reasons he probably intended. Warren still wanted them to like him. Hurting them just for the hell of it would be counterproductive. It didn’t make them safe, not in the slightest, but it was better.

Warren looked at Layla. “I just want you to keep an open mind.” He smiled, and it looked genuine. “Anywhere we can all sit down?”

“No,” Zach said. The word was frankly hostile. “You can’t take this, too.” He stepped forward so that he was next to Layla instead of behind her. “We can talk here. We can talk out there.” He jerked his chin toward the door behind Warren.

Everyone present knew that Warren could force the issue. He just couldn’t do it without threats or actual violence. None of them thought he was stupid enough to think he could win them over that way. He could break them faster that way, but, if he did, he’d get what he paid for.

But she’d once been completely certain that he was a good guy, too, so her record on reading Warren was pretty lousy. Part of her still thought he was, but she recognized that as desperation. She could think of explanations for everything he’d done. Not a one of those made him a good guy.

Warren hesitated. “Okay,” he said at last. His smile this time was a little more obviously fake. “So we stand here? Sit on the floor here? Something?”

“Your call on that one,” Ethan said. “ _You_ have the option of opening the door.” Ethan sounded friendlier than Zach had but not like he was actually buying Warren’s bullshit. Ethan sounded like he might consider making a deal.

Layla turned her back on Warren, bowed her head, and let her shoulders shake. “What happened to Will?” She didn’t bother to hide the fear in that. Maybe Warren would assume that the shaking was tears rather than anger.

Ethan put his arms around her and patted her back. “I think we’d all like that answer.”

Since her facial expression did show anger, she knew he was helping her deception deliberately.

“I don’t know.”

Zach growled.

“No. Seriously, I don’t. Royal Pain doesn’t have him because he’s still on her most-wanted list. We don’t have him.”

“Would you even know?” Ethan asked. His grip on Layla tightened a little, and she suspected it was because he was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from wrapping both hands around Warren’s neck.

Layla had better self-control than that. She did.

“Gwen would want everyone to know that she’ll go after revenge for the petty shit, too. If she had Stronghold, she’d be showing him off. It wouldn’t be pretty, but I’d know.” Warren sounded as if Gwen was the world’s brattiest three year old painting the walls with six different shades of nail polish. “And, if I knew, I’d tell you.” He hesitated. “I’m pretty sure my parents would tell me if they had the Commander’s son. Dad has ideas, but he’s promised that, if I catch Stronghold first, he’s mine.”

_Parents_. Layla’s mind seized on that as more important than what Warren was saying about Will. She believed the part about Gwen. The rest might be all lies, but the word ‘parents’ gave her information she’d wanted.

“I couldn’t put him in here with you,” Warren went on, “not without hostages or something, but he’d be okay in one of the detention rooms. Taking sponge baths for a while is better than the other options.”

Layla thought she believed Warren on that one. If Warren captured Will, Will would live. He’d be uncomfortable, but he wouldn’t get hurt. She refused to think about what Royal Pain or Barron Battle might do. She refused to think that she was helpless in the face of that.

She put her helplessness aside and pulled away from Ethan. She kept her back to Warren and walked four steps deeper into the locker room. “Thank you for that, at least,” she said in the shakiest voice she could manage. With a little luck, Will had left town to find allies. The Commander wouldn’t have thought to, but Will had the advantage of having spent weeks with no powers to keep him safe from superpowered bullies. Neither Will nor his father would call that an advantage, but it was. It really was.

Maybe Will had gone to her parents for help. That wasn’t a stretch since his parents and hers were friends, and it might mean that her parents knew what had happened. All of the worry about her parents that she hadn’t let herself feel before came to the surface, and she found herself actually crying.

More than anything, she wanted to go home. She wanted her mother’s arms around her, the scent of their home instead of fear and rotting damp.

“What now?” Ethan said.

Warren seemed to take a very long time to answer. “I think… I think I’ll take you out one at a time. You can each ask questions and see what’s out there now. I want my people-- they’re all kind of… borrowed from my parents-- to see you.”

It was only later that Layla was able to go through that part of the conversation and analyze it. She was crying too hard to do more than remember Warren’s words, but her father would never forgive her if the villain said something important, and she missed it completely because she was crying. He’d been captured often enough to start a support group for unpowered partners of superheroes (and supervillains. They were inclusive. They didn’t ask questions, and what was said in group stayed in group), and he’d taught Layla some survival strategies early.

James Peterson Williams did not believe in painting a target on himself or on his daughter. He didn’t approve of Sky High at all. He was 75% of the reason Layla was a sidekick. The other 25% really was because the system was stupid and unfair, but mostly, she’d done it because her father would worry less.

Ethan ended up going for a walk with Warren while Layla cried herself out. He was gone long enough that Magenta came back, picked a fight with Zach, and had time to calm down before Ethan returned with a box full of paperbacks from the school library.

That was when Layla was certain that Warren was courting them. He was fifteen, maybe sixteen. He owned a floating island with a school on it, but he only had people to staff it because his parents were indulging him. 

Warren wanted his parents to be proud. He also wanted independence. Taking Sky High was the entrance exam for villainy. Keeping it, making something of it, those were the real tests of Warren’s ability, and a huge part of that was going to be finding people of his own.

They’d still be pets, but they were proof of concept. If he could coax them in or even simply break them beyond resistance, he’d know he could do it with other people, people he actually needed, people who could be useful to him.

It wasn’t as if four freshmen, four sidekicks, mattered in the grand scheme of things. Warren’s parents could afford to let Warren experiment with them. It cost them nothing at all.

Layla and her friends ended up sitting on the floor of the office to talk because, if they all sat on a bench between rows of lockers, they couldn’t see each other, because the shower floor was always wet, and because none of them wanted to sit on the floor between the toilets and the sinks or with a bench between them at eye level.

Layla, Zach, and Magenta looked at Ethan expectantly. 

He shook his head. “I can tell you what he said. I can tell you what I saw. Can’t tell you how Potemkin it all was.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “He says all the villains broke out the night of Homecoming. Three different maximum security prisons empty. His mother coordinated everything when he told her about Royal Pain’s plan. He was… I couldn’t get a straight answer on what they gave Royal Pain in exchange for Sky High. He said she wanted to blow it up. Then he started asking me questions about how we were doing in here. I told him the plots of our books-- all of them. In detail-- but it still took me twenty minutes to get him answering me again.”

Layla closed her eyes for a moment and tried to remember who had been in prison with Barron Battle. Then, she tried hard to make the math for three maximum security prisons come out to less than hundreds of people who thought that having superpowers meant they could hurt other people and get away with it. 

She hoped desperately her parents had had some warning, that Will was surviving somehow.

She also hoped that those hundreds of supervillains hated each other. Better they fight each other than gang up on anyone else or any place else. Of course, if they all attacked one place, the rest of the world would be safer. She shook her head because that was a stupid thought. If they attacked one place, they’d strip it and move on, like locusts.

“Even just one prison would be bad,” she told her friends softly. “It explains why we’re still sitting in here. Nobody’s got time to deal with Sky High when it’s not attacking anyone.” She was pretty sure that Magenta would have noticed weapons emplacements. Magenta’d seen Warren’s people doing supply runs, but there hadn’t been absences to indicate anything more than that. Not yet.

Ethan said, “He told me that they’ve moved the island and that they sabotaged Royal Pain’s buses just enough to make sure she couldn’t get back here. Not uninvited, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t bet against Gwen on that,” Magenta said. “Technopaths-- Well, isn’t rebuilding tech one of their things?”

“It’s more…” Ethan hesitated. “I think maybe it was more like deleting Sky High’s… frequency? ...from all of the buses. No damage but no data. He said she tried leaving about a dozen different devices on the island and that part of what’s keeping him busy is finding those.”

“Then Warren’s got a Technopath, too,” Zach said.

Layla thought that was self-evident, but maybe the others didn’t have the same depth of knowledge of superpowered history and tactics as she did. “No, _Warren_ doesn’t. His parents do. Half the people out there are sending reports to his mother. The other half--” She shrugged.

Each of the others nodded, but Zach was the one who said it. “All report to his father.”

Magenta snorted. “Bet some of them are spies for other people, too. Good place to dump a known spy because it looks like trusting them.”

“Warren’s as trapped as we are.” Layla felt a little sorry for him. Not very much sorry, but a little. “I can see… He got to know us enough to like us, enough to think we could be useful--” Better her friends think that than that they realize how thoroughly expendable even Warren thought they were. “--but not well enough to outweigh, well…” She shrugged. “If my parents wanted to do all of this, I might not say no.”

Zach looked a little like she’d hauled off and kicked a puppy, but Ethan nodded.

Magenta looked from one face to another. “Being honest… I don’t have a reason to care about any of this shit apart from you guys. If it was just me, I’d be Warren’s sidekick, but if I was on the ground when all this happened, I wouldn’t feel a burning need to go looking for him. I just-- As long as it matters to the rest of you, Warren can go fuck himself.”

“Magenta,” Layla tried to make her words gentle. “If he can keep us for months, we're all going to end up working for him and meaning it.” She knew her father would tell her to make whatever promises she had to and then run like hell as soon as she could, but the part of her that hated Sky High also hated the idea of giving her word with full intent to break it. “It would be easier if he wasn't likable.” She tried to hold onto the memory of people regressing to infancy, of the screams and the panic, but part of her mind kept whispering that that had been Gwen. Gwen who she'd already hated. Warren hadn't done that.

He'd known it would happen, and he hadn't tried to stop it.

“Give me a minute,” Layla said. Then, she pulled her knees against her chest so that she could rest her head on them. The only way through was by losing something precious, something different each way. Her choice was which one.

Magenta started rubbing Layla's back. “You've still got us.”

Layla suspected that Magenta could promise Warren anything and then screw him over without any regrets, without feeling like she’d cut off a piece of herself. Which was probably why Magenta didn’t think that working for Warren would necessarily be bad. “I can’t,” she told Magenta. She had no idea whether Ethan or Zach could or would even feel like they ought to.

Layla closed her eyes for a moment. “If he’d only caught me,” she said at last, feeling as if each word was yanking out part of her soul, “I’d probably wait to see how he turns out. Then… When he finally goes bad, I’d either kill him or I’d jump. He protected us, but he’s going to go bad.”

Magenta’s hand kept moving on Layla’s back. “Layla.” Magenta sounded very serious and urgent. “He didn’t. He really didn’t. If he wanted to protect us, he’d have made sure we stayed home. If he wanted to now, he’d _send_ us home. We’re here because he decided he wanted us to be.” She sighed. “It’s too bad, too, because I thought you’d found us a winner. Even without the fire, he’s hot.”

Zach sighed in a way that sounded a lot like agreement.

“Just not hot enough to get me past the knowing what would happen in advance part.” Magenta sounded genuinely sad. “You’d never be able to trust him not to gaslight you.”

Layla gave herself a few seconds to breathe and to try to stitch Magenta’s truths into her own soul. “I’m pretty sure,” she said, “that not trusting him because of that means more than just not fucking him.” She used the word very deliberately in an effort to impress the importance of the sentence on herself. “We just can’t tell him that because he’ll either keep us in here forever or let someone else kill us.”

“We don’t all have to make the same choice.” Ethan didn’t sound as if he liked what he was saying.

“I’m not willing to leave anybody behind,” Magenta said sharply. “If I was, I’d have done it already. I’m pretty sure _I_ could get to a bus and get it airborne. I’m betting that the landing is automated somehow.”

Layla knew that ‘betting,’ in this case, didn’t mean that Magenta thought the odds favored her. It was just a gamble she’d be willing to make.

“It’s unfair,” Zach said, “that you’re the one with every option open.” The bitterness in his voice didn’t seem to be aimed at Magenta. “We’re not going to try to talk you into staying if you really think it would work. Half of us maybe getting out might be worth it.”

“If only Warren’s family knows how to find Sky High now, rescue isn’t coming.” Layla had to put that out that as bluntly as possible because they all needed to look at it directly. “It’s never impossible, but the chance is pretty tiny. I don’t think we get that sort of happy ending.” She looked at Zach. “You’re the one with the least to actually do. I’m not sure how you’re not the one falling apart. Instead of me.”

He leaned over and patted Layla’s arm. “I don’t love Will the way you do. I trust him. He’s a good friend most of the time. You’ve been worried about him on top of everything else.”

“I was worried about him so that I didn’t have to look at other things.” If Layla was going to face reality, she wasn’t going to ignore that shadowed corner. “Just like the stuff in the shower was more to keep from panicking than because I thought it would go anywhere. I think it might take months for me to figure out anything useful.” She shifted position to sit cross-legged with her spine straight. “If I-- Well, if I do, I bet I could get lab space. If I just tell him mold manipulation, he’ll call it a sidekick power. He won’t realize it could be more.” 

She looked at Ethan. “Did he take you outside? Maybe I could--” She choked on the idea. It would be beyond risky because it hinged on him not wanting to hurt her, really not wanting to, and because she’d only get one chance. At that point, he’d know that she had a hero track power. “I just have to drop the right seed at the right time.” She swallowed hard and closed her eyes. “Poison ivy burns toxic.” She was almost sure she remembered that, and she had two seeds. They just wouldn’t do her any good without soil to root themselves in, not for this.

“He took me outside,” Ethan said. “Far enough that nobody was obviously listening.”

“I won’t if you’d all rather not,” Layla said, and she knew it was true. She’d give up something else if they asked her to.

“If we don’t,” Zach said, “it won’t be because we like Warren.” He met Layla’s eyes. “If we do that, if we get away, do we--? We’d have to take him on the bus with us. What happens when we land?”

Layla’d been too busy thinking about the likelihood of getting shot in the back to consider that angle.

“We let him go,” Ethan said. “We’re not him. But… I’m not sure he-- I’d almost swear he was hoping that there was something I could do.”

Magenta snorted. “If all we want is him as a hostage, I could do it. It would take time to set up because I’d need to steal a gun. It’s just… I know where I could, and I know where he sleeps.” She inhaled audibly, sounding as if she were making a decision. “That would keep you for the back up, Layla. I don’t think there’s a hell of a lot more we can do with me in the ducts. If he attacks me and the-- I don’t know. Maybe a freeze ray? --then he’s really _not_ hoping we can do something. If he hurts me, well, we need that information, too.”

It was a better place to start than Layla’s plan, and she knew it, but using it meant that Magenta and Ethan couldn’t escape on their own if Layla’s plan failed. Was Layla hiding her power important enough for that risk?

“If we try and fail, things are going to get really, really bad,” Layla said. That part needed to be out there, too. “He might forgive us. He might never forgive us. That’s not going to matter because--” She shook her head.

“He’ll lose face,” Zach said. “If everyone knows we did, then everyone has to know he punished us.”

None of them said anything for almost a minute.

“We should at least talk about surrendering,” Layla said. “Whether we’re lying or not, it’s short term safer. If we’re not lying--” She shook her head.

“We’re in on the ground floor of something,” Magenta said. “But we don’t know what, and we’re giving up everything else for it. I’m good with that for me, but the rest of you--” She didn’t look happy. “The not knowing part makes buying in-- Yeah. We all know the risks, and we’d all pay different prices.”

That wasn’t exactly what Layla was thinking. She was only thinking about the price. She didn’t want any part of what Warren’s something might end up being.

“I don’t think Warren knows,” Ethan said. “He’s only a sophomore. That’s kind of early to settle on bank robberies versus ruling the world versus just terrorizing people.”

“If we did-- capture him, I mean. If we did--” Zach sounded a little horrified and a lot defiant. His hands clenched. “I wouldn’t let him go. What he’s done to us-- is still doing-- I want him to know what it feels like.” Zach refused to meet anyone else’s eyes. “I don’t want to be that, but I am.”

Layla really didn’t want to address that or to figure out where she stood on it. Possibly the practical difficulties of holding Warren long term would make the decision for them. She looked at Magenta instead of at Zach. “Warren sleeps alone? No guards? No monitors?”

Magenta nodded. “Sleeps sound, too.” She raised her chin a little. “I tested.”

Layla felt a chill.

Magenta had been two steps ahead of the rest of them. She probably already had a weapon by the vent opening into the room where Warren slept.

Layla studied her friend and realized for the first time that Magenta would kill. She wouldn’t be happy about killing Warren or enthusiastic, but she’d be able to do it. The only reason she hadn’t yet was because she hadn’t figured out how to use his murder to help the rest of them. 

Layla wasn’t sure any of the rest of them could kill, not Warren, not anybody. Not yet. Not as they were at that moment.

Would Warren understand that Magenta wasn’t bluffing?

If Magenta wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter that Layla was. As long as Magenta didn’t know.

Layla considered her seeds. She considered the things growing in the shower area. “If he sleeps soundly…” She hesitated. She looked at Ethan.

He didn’t look happy, but he nodded. “I’ll go, too,” he said.

“We might be able to poison him,” Layla said. “If he cooperates, I can give him the antidote after we land. If he doesn’t…” She shrugged. “It’ll take me time to make both since we haven’t got any way to heat things.” All she really needed was something to make Warren feel sick and think he was getting sicker, something to make a time limit believable. She could cold brew something, but he’d have to drink it. She narrowed her eyes as she considered what needed doing.

“He’s not going to stop trying to win us over,” Ethan said. “We have time.” He glanced sideways at Zach. “If we can hold it together, we’ve got time.” The look he gave Layla told her that he suspected she was exaggerating what she could do.

She lifted one shoulder a fraction of an inch and let it drop. She was pretty sure that Ethan saw it and that neither Magenta nor Zach did.

“Who goes with Warren next?” Ethan asked. He looked at Zach and then at Magenta. “Maybe better you. I don’t know what happens if Zach punches him. Also, once you’ve done it, you’re free until he comes back around to you. I don’t think he’ll take more than one of us out at a time.” He took a deep breath. “More of us out there at once increases the risk-- from his point of view-- that hurting one of us will be a thing he has to do. There’s a reason he has someone else outside the door.”

So Ethan thought Layla should go last. She wondered if he was hoping to spare her for a while or if he was putting off the risk of her tipping their hand. Or getting herself shot. If she wrapped Warren in poison ivy, a bullet in the back was a serious risk. It was a probability even if Warren told them not to shoot. From what Magenta said, the people out there weren’t scared enough of Warren to obey a command that might get him killed, not when disobedience only meant him being pissed off.

Layla thought she’d choose facing Warren in a rage over facing Barron Battle, too.

She wondered how Warren felt about either of his parents. How old was he when his father went to prison? What was his mother like? Layla couldn’t remember the woman’s first name or powers, so all she could go on was Warren’s actions and the connection to Barron Battle.

Layla wondered which parent Warren most feared disappointing and which parent he feared most more generally. She pushed those questions aside because looking at them too hard might make her start sympathizing with Warren again.


	3. Magenta: Never Trusted the Garden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Edward Hirsch's "Gertrude Stein."
> 
> Magenta, Ethan, and Zach all ended up with a lot of invented backstory, but I’ve tried to keep that consistent with what we see in canon. I’m assuming that, somehow, improbably, history and culture in the Sky High universe are very similar to ours. I haven’t attempted to reconcile that on the world building side in this AU (one of my other Sky High stories tries). At any rate, I ended up taking each of these three in a different direction than the other two because them being different made the story more interesting.
> 
> Magenta gets the sharp edges and a past that’s taught her a different set of lessons than what her friends know. I don’t think her past has any specific, large bad events; it’s just been without reliably good things.

Outings with Warren happened at regular intervals. Magenta was grateful for that because it meant she knew when she had to be in their prison. She tried to be there when Warren took anyone out or brought anyone back.

Well for certain values of ‘tried.’ Being in the locker room was depressing as hell. It stank from the crap Layla had growing on the walls and from people having been trapped inside it for days that were turning into weeks, and she hated seeing Zach and Layla working so hard to keep themselves from falling apart.

Warren had finally given them bedding about a week in. All five of them had known that he was withholding it deliberately. Even if Magenta hadn’t seen the makeshift barracks in half a dozen classrooms and the crates of supplies in several others, Warren’s prisoners would have known.

And all of them knew that it was Warren trying to get inside their heads. If he’d known more about them, he’d have had better levers. Magenta kept expecting him to turn up with Layla’s father or Zach’s sister or… well somebody they cared about who Warren didn’t.

Ethan and Layla might be right that Warren actually liked them, cared about them in some twisted way, but Magenta was pretty sure that the four of them were someone else’s lesson for Warren. She just wasn’t sure if the lesson involved him trusting them and them fucking him over or him taking them to pieces and rebuilding them to suit. Maybe it wasn’t a true/false thing. Maybe either outcome would serve.

Magenta preferred the fucking him over option because it would let them choose. She hadn’t been lying when she said she’d have worked for Warren willingly if it had just been her, but it wasn’t just her. It wasn’t going to be just her again. If it ever was… She’d cross that bridge if it turned up, but right now, if that happened, everyone on this rock would die.

Warren’s people hadn’t found all of Gwen’s devices. Magenta could set off the last one whenever she chose to. If they escaped, she was still undecided about what she’d do with the bomb. Setting it off would cover their tracks pretty damned well, and it might be a really bad thing to have Warren’s parents hunting them.

Which meant that Warren couldn’t be allowed to tell them either. From his parents’ point of view, the fucking him over path had to end with Magenta and her friends dying in order for Warren to learn and harden. If they escaped and then let Warren go, they’d have him _and_ his parents hunting them. His parents would insist, and Warren would obey. Warren wasn’t stupid enough not to.

Magenta thought she could tell a lot about how Warren felt about his parents by the fact that he didn’t visit them. That they hadn’t visited him was equally telling. They might have been exchanging letters or some other low tech shit that was hard to spy on from a vent, but she didn’t think so.

She also thought that the four of them weren’t the only people Warren was trying to win over. He was having some of ‘his’ minions teach him things that he damned well ought to have known already. If Magenta had Warren’s powers, she’d have memorized the byproducts of combustion for everything she could think of. Possibly the fighting techniques really were new to him. She didn’t think they were, given how he moved and the sorts of ‘mistakes’ he made, but they might have been. The financial tricks and technology probably were new to him. They were new to Magenta, so she tried to be there for them.

Warren’s teachers/minders were idiots, though. As far as she could tell, none of them realized that he was playing them. They thought he was a promising kid and that they had a cushy job helping him figure out supervillainy.

They never noticed that Warren didn’t actually like any of them. He didn’t hate them, either, but he could set them on fire and not bother to watch while they burned. If he burned one of his sidekick prisoners, he’d probably watch.

Which was in no way reassuring or helpful. Apart from knowing that Warren’s people were really stupid. That part could be useful.

The important point about the minions was that most of them were more afraid of Sylvia Peace than they were of Barron Battle. Eavesdropping had given Magenta enough information to be pretty sure that the woman could fuck with minds and that she was unsubtle enough about it that everyone knew and thought that was worse than burning.

Magenta hadn’t told anyone except Ethan. She didn’t think that Zach and Layla needed that hanging over them. They couldn’t defend against it, and knowing would just twist them harder.

That steady drip-drip wearing away at Zach and Layla’s ability to hope was the thing that made Magenta want to set off the damned bomb right away. Warren was trying to take them away from her, and she wasn’t going to let him do it. There actually were things worse than dying. She only held off because they still might find a way out.

Magenta hadn’t been in the locker room when Layla came out of the shower with one hand covered in mold spores, but she knew the other three well enough to picture it. Ethan probably grinned, and Zach almost certainly had given Layla a thumbs up.

Layla still had no idea what the hell to _do_ with mold spores, but two weeks of sitting in puddles had gotten her somewhere. She’d taken some of their extra water bottles-- Every locker they’d opened had held one, and the office had had a dozen spares-- and put a little food from their most recent meal in each and left them sitting in the shower room with more crap growing in them. She said each one was a different species. Probably. She said that she needed enough of each to read their potential. She said that, for plants, sensing potential felt like the plant _wanting_ to do the things that it could, things that weren’t just growing.

The mold wasn’t telling Layla anything yet, but it came when she called. It grew at her command. That was something. Might be something.

Magenta wasn’t willing to rely on those water bottles producing something useful, but she wasn’t going to bet against, either, not unless she had to choose between keeping the experiments going and safety for her friends. What Layla was doing and what she might potentially do with it could end up being a lot more dangerous for the group than Magenta spying and putting granola bars in strategic places because it was pretty clearly a weapon.

There was a reason Magenta hadn’t hidden any actual weapons in the ducts yet. The moment she did, they’d have crossed from playing forgivable games to rebellion that required punishment. Hair pins and straightened wires from spiral notebooks weren’t really dangerous. Magenta would have to work really hard to hurt anyone with those. She could, and she would, but they were toys.

Ethan working on learning to move in his puddle form was also something that could be dismissed as harmless. That might change if he got somewhere, but that was going to take longer than Layla’s mold garden. For now, they just all gave him space and pretended not to notice when he couldn’t quite manage whatever he was trying.

Zach might have been working on his powers, too. Magenta wasn’t sure she’d know until he managed something. She just knew he spent a lot of time in the darker parts of the area where the toilet stalls were. She couldn’t think what he might be able to manage, though. A brighter light was still just light. As far as she could tell, he’d never managed any sort of heat, and she couldn’t come up with any other ideas for him to chase. Maybe someone else could. Magenta doubted it, but maybe someone else could.

*****

Warren was pretty damned careful not to touch her or Layla. Magenta didn’t think he’d missed that Layla’d be vulnerable to physical touch and affection, so he just wasn’t choosing to use it. She wasn’t sure if he’d realized that Magenta wasn’t. She suspected that he still thought she had a marshmallow core.

Which she kind of did, but it had all long ago carbonized.

Warren could have shattered her if he’d hit her fast enough and hard enough. Everything he’d done instead was just compressing her to diamond hardness.

He also had no idea what the pressure was doing to Layla.

Not that Magenta was certain either. She was pretty sure that Layla was testing her poisons on herself. So far, Layla hadn’t done anything worse than throwing up, and she hadn’t done that for several days now. Layla’d learned how to deal with plant derived poisons in her own system. If Magenta’d known Layla’s powers, she’d have bet against that working, but she’d also have bet against fungus and mildew and mold.

Layla was sprouting through concrete. She might die in the process, but the concrete was going down. If it got to that point, Magenta was going to use Gwen’s bomb. Otherwise, if there was an afterlife, Layla’d ruin it for herself with guilt.

Let Gwen carry it instead. Gwen wouldn’t notice it at all. Not until Warren’s parents started shredding her.

Magenta refused to carry things like that. She’d carry her friends willingly, but she wasn’t going to be saddled with guilt over assholes who’d chosen to be where they were.

Not one of them would have tried to stop Warren if he’d wanted to be a torturer or rapist. They’d have bet on the outcome and hoped for scraps.

Magenta thought that Ethan might be the only one who actually understood what it meant when Magenta said she could see herself working with them. Ethan didn’t like it, but he hadn’t pushed her away. He understood the part about her loving them all, too. He understood that she was letting the rest of them make the ethical decisions.

He also understood that there was a point when she’d stop doing that.

Ethan being so very stable was the one thing keeping Zach and Layla from cracking. As long as they didn’t, Magenta didn’t need to start stealing chemicals from Medulla’s lab in order to poison the soup, but she had spent some time in the library, looking at old books, so that she’d know what would be lethal enough. The only reason she hadn’t done it yet was that Layla wouldn’t be able to let the deaths go.

Well, that and Medulla’s lab didn’t have arsenic. She was still searching janitors’ closets in hopes of finding rat poison. She probably wouldn’t use it immediately, but having it would be very, very nice.

 

**Friday, 11 November 2005**

She didn’t usually talk much when Warren took her out for walkies. She kept her attention on him with the sort of focus she’d give a toddler with a shotgun. She was pretty sure that he misread it because he kept trying to coax her into talking.

This time, when he took her out, she gave him a hard look after the door closed behind them. “Do you actually want any of us as us?”

He smiled.

“Don’t,” she told him. “Just… don’t.”

The smile vanished. “I do, actually,” he said softly.

She believed him, and that made what he was doing worse. “You’re fucking it up royally, then.” She didn’t say anything else for a while. She simply headed for the nearest door to the outside. She’d found out the first time that Warren would let her lead unless she started heading for something he considered a risk. The lawn was open as long as she didn’t go near the buses or any of the construction.

She spent a few minutes just looking up at the sky. She wondered how Layla managed not to make everything grow around her the moment she stepped outside. Magenta wouldn’t have that kind of control, not after so very long locked in.

Maybe the fungus and the algae, the mold and the mildew, helped with that.

This time, when she looked at Warren, she thought his smile was genuine. She gave him the ghost of a smile then looked away. “If you push Zach wrong,” she said after another minute of studying the clouds, “you’re going to kill him.” It was true. Ethan had started showering with Zach so that he wouldn’t be alone with Layla’s potions. 

Magenta didn’t think that Zach would do that to Layla. She kept her expression calm and her voice quiet as she said, “When he punches you-- maybe not next time you take him out or the time after, but eventually-- When he does, those asshole snipers are going to put a bullet through him. He knows it, too. I’m also pretty sure that he knows that the only way he’ll land anything on you is if you let it happen.”

Warren was the only one who thought that walking around with him was anything like safe.

Warren didn’t respond, so Magenta thought he understood. If he hadn’t, he’d have protested.

“Spite toward you isn’t worth a single one of them dying.” She didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to let her out based on that. She’d have to work the angles for it, and, really, she wasn’t the one who needed an exit.

“I thought about building something nicer than the locker room,” Warren said. “It just… It’d have to be so much like the locker room that I didn’t see the point.”

“Letting Gwen have us might have been kinder.”

“No one ever taught me to be kind.”

Neither of them said anything for a while, and Magenta started walking again. “They would have tried,” she said eventually. Saying that was a calculated risk because it was a very clear statement that Magenta did not consider herself kind, but, when she finally had Warren on the right end of a gun, she wanted him to understand that she would-- could-- pull the trigger. She wanted him to understand that, while she knew he’d be more useful alive, she was willing to shoot him and deal with things being harder.

She wouldn’t ever point a gun at someone she wasn’t prepared to shoot.

“If your parents’ people kill Zach, you won’t get any of us.” Magenta saw no point in pretending that any of these minions worked for Warren. “Take him to the gym and let him hit something. Teach him something.” She looked directly at Warren. “He needs to be reminded that there’s something out here.”

“What do I get for that?” Warren’s expression was appraising.

She shrugged. “I’m fourteen. Not a lot I know how to do yet.” Not for the first time, she considered offering sex, but she’d already decided that it was a terrible idea. She didn’t want her first under these circumstances, and she was pretty sure that Warren would be offended.

Weird that that was a line he wouldn’t cross. Weird that he’d think that was worse than what he was already doing. Maybe it had something to do with his parents. Everything else did.

Magenta wasn’t going to offer Warren promises right away. She’d never mean them, but, if she offered now, he’d know she didn’t. Warren wasn’t even remotely stupid, and he’d never been sheltered in the ways her friends had been.

She only let herself wonder about Will occasionally. Praying didn’t do a damned thing, and that was all she could do for him until they were out of this trap. He’d have to figure out how to take care of himself. Being physically indestructible would only help so far.

“Being fourteen is temporary.” Warren sounded tentative, and she realized that he had no idea what she-- what any one of the four of them-- might do for him, not on a nuts and bolts level.

She gave him a look and said, “Being alive is temporary. So very much not the point. If you want us as us, you’ve got to give us--” She used each hand to trace a half circle that connected to the other hand’s arc. “--we need a target area, so we can decide if it’s worth it. If it’s not…” She shrugged. She’d already told him the easy way for any of them to commit suicide.

Ethan wouldn’t kill himself, but Ethan also wouldn’t break. Magenta didn’t know what he _would_ do if they couldn’t escape; she just knew it wouldn’t be what any of the rest of them would.

Magenta needed Ethan to stay solid beneath her so that she didn’t fall. He knew that, so he would manage somehow.

If Warren could coax Zach into survival, Warren would eventually own him. Layla-- Magenta thought Warren might get hooks into parts of Layla, had already, really, but wouldn’t catch all of her. Layla would fragment. She’d end up destroying a lot of people because plants did that if they had the tiniest place to root themselves, but she’d never be sane again.

Warren didn’t understand Layla, and Magenta wasn’t going to tell him where he was going wrong. Layla’d prefer madness to working for or with Warren, and working for either of Warren’s parents would be worse.

If they managed to kidnap Warren, Magenta was going to make sure Zach got his revenge, not because Warren deserved it-- though he did-- but because Zach needed it. Holding Warren wouldn’t be easy, but it wouldn’t be anything like as hard as he’d expect. Magenta was already researching materials she could put on the walls, floor, and ceiling that would be hellishly toxic when heated or burned. Making sure the vents closed at the first sign of smoke would be harder, but it could be done.

She wasn’t going to make the mistake that Warren had made. She would never think he was helpless.

“I want--” Warren hesitated. “I _need_ people who can call my on my bullshit.”

Magenta turned to face him fully. She gave him a flatly disbelieving expression. “You could get that without the psychological torture. You could get that without breaking anybody. You’d be more likely to get that.”

Warren knew that. Magenta could see it in the way he held his shoulders and in the tightness around his eyes.

“You want that,” she told him softly. “You just want other things more. Things from people who aren’t us.” That was the closest she was going to get to mentioning his relationship with his parents. “You’re going to have to decide. This half-assing isn’t getting you anything.” She wasn’t sure if telling him that would be a good thing for her and her friends, but she also expected that they’d be kidnapping Warren even if he started trying to treat them better.

Emotionally, they could have walked away the day after. They were upset but not entangled, and they weren’t important enough for anyone to notice. At this point, however, even if Warren wanted to let them go, he couldn’t.

And they couldn’t stay without her friends becoming something they didn’t want to be.

“What do you need to make it bearable?”

She sighed. “Pie in the sky? Let us go. We won’t try to get back here. We’ll probably try to do something about whatever the hell big thing is going on because we don’t want to get fucking crushed in the gears. We’re sidekicks, but Zach and Layla have people on the other side.” Ethan’s family was so low profile that that might not be a factor for him, but Magenta wasn’t going to speak for him.

She studied Warren’s face. “Yeah, didn’t think so. How about cable? CNN would go a long way. I’m pretty sure you can do that without losing anything.” She hesitated. She was pretty sure she’d kill for extra underwear, even one set so that she had something to wear while she washed and air dried the other. It just wasn’t nearly as important as a connection to the outside world. She tried to think of something she could offer him, something he could use. “Would it help if the snipers think we’re making out? If they think you’re getting some, they’ll probably just laugh when you give us extras.”

Warren blinked at her. Then he got it. He looked a little sick. He inhaled and exhaled slowly. “It would probably work,” he admitted.

“I’m not offering anything real,” she told him.

Something in his expression told her that he had just realized that she would if it would buy anything. For a moment, his revulsion showed. That she was almost certain his disgust was aimed at himself for wanting to rather than at her for being willing didn’t help much. 

“Don’t tell the others that part,” she said softly. “It would be cruel to make them see it.” She already knew what she was. She’d shown her friends the killer and the collaborator. She didn’t want to show them this. It was a logical companion to the rest, but she didn’t think they should bear this, too.

He nodded, and her opinion of him went up a little when he didn’t immediately threaten to tell them. She wasn’t sure if he realized that she wouldn’t give him anything for it or if he really didn’t want to hurt the others. “A hug,” he said. “At least thirty seconds. Then we hold hands and go to my room. It’s the old infirmary. We stay in there a while.” He hesitated. “Are they likely to listen?”

She raised her eyebrows to ask if that was really a question in his mind.

He looked embarrassed.

She stepped in close and laid her head against his chest. She forced her shoulders to relax as he put his arms around her. Part of her wished it could be real, and noticing that weakness in herself made her start to pull away.

Warren’s arms tightened minutely then loosened. “I’ll let go if you’ve changed your mind,” he murmured. “Otherwise, even if it’s pretend, I’d rather not act like I’m forcing you.”

She put her hands on his upper arms. “It’s okay,” she told him. “Put your hands on my ass, and try to look like you’re enjoying it.” She didn’t want to raise her head because that might let someone see her face. If there wasn’t someone watching with a scope or with binoculars, she’d eat everything Layla’d managed to grow in the showers. “I don’t have to do anything but look like I’m convincing _you_. You have to sell it.”

Warren growled at her, but his hands moved. Ten seconds or so later, she moved her hands to his face and faked a kiss. Their faces were close enough that she thought it might as well be a kiss, but Warren seemed to think it was somehow less terrible if their lips didn’t touch. Her hands concealed the distance they kept between them.

When they separated, Warren tried to take her hand, but she ducked under his arm so that she was leaning against his side as they walked. 

Magenta was really glad that Warren had told her where his room was. She might have given herself away on that because being that close to Warren was distracting. Her body still thought his was hot. She reminded herself that she’d have enough privacy in the shower later to get herself off. She wasn’t sure if any of the others did it, but she wouldn’t have been surprised. It was a little bit of things being better.

They passed people on the way. Most of them didn’t think Magenta was important enough to acknowledge, but they approved of the idea of Warren taking what he wanted.

Magenta noted the ones who studied her with an eye toward threat assessment. She might need to know that. She gave each of them a small, self-satisfied smile as if she were empty headed enough to think that fucking Warren would buy her something. Magenta memorized the faces of those whose attention sharpened in response.

Every last one of the goons was dangerous, but those people were the biggest threats. Either they didn’t believe she was giving them the truth or they bought it and thought she’d hurt Warren. Both options made them smarter than the others.

She was a little surprised to hear a baby crying. Not because she hadn’t known about the babies but because Warren was letting her hear it. She supposed that there wasn’t anything he thought she could do with the information. “How many did you keep?” she asked softly. “And did Gwen agree or did you lie to her?”

“We lied.” Warren didn’t break stride. “She needed more than one trip, and she never tracked how many there were or which were which.” From the way he said it, he made it clear that he had tracked which were which.

Magenta hadn’t even told Ethan about the babies. If everything worked right, they’d be able to take the babies. If it didn’t, the four of them might still escape as long as the other three didn’t know what they were leaving behind.

Magenta wasn’t going to tell Warren that Layla would surrender-- really surrender-- if he had Will’s parents or even just made her think he might. Layla wasn’t so near to disintegration that Magenta thought she needed to tell her. Magenta wasn’t sure there was a point of disintegration that she would consider bad enough.

Which was entirely because Magenta was selfish.

Warren wasn’t telling Layla because he was stupid. The babies might even be a lever that would move _Ethan_ , and Magenta would bet that nothing else would.

She closed her eyes for a moment. Would it be better for her friends to surrender? Or was Layla’s plan really a thing that could work? Well, it _could_. And Magenta could jump off the edge of the island in guinea pig form and sprout wings on the way down. It wasn’t likely, but it was possible.

Layla’s plan had better odds than that, and it was the only option that might let all of them go on and be who they’d wanted to be. Magenta had only just started to see shadows of what she, herself, might become, and she’d only done that because her friends could see it.

She let herself consider all of that while she sat in Warren’s room and stared at the wall. She’d gotten time to herself by pointing out that the lack of a used condom in his trash would be taken as evidence that nothing had happened. Someone would check.

Warren took a very long time about the business.

Magenta curled up on his bed and held her knees to her chest. She could make everything work. Somehow. Her friends would be safe, so that she could be safe, and-- 

She was still crying when Warren came out, and she couldn’t make herself sit up and look at him. She registered that he looked horrified, and part of her hoped that the memory of her there would make sleep impossible for him that night.

Zach might not be the only one who needed Warren to suffer.

Warren sat on the bed next to her but didn’t touch her. “Is this about pretending or is it about--?”

At least he knew he’d hurt her, that he’d hurt all of them. She didn’t even try to answer because she didn’t have words. She was breaking, too, just like Zach and Layla. Warren was winning.

Magenta couldn’t let Warren win. She also couldn’t sacrifice her friends to beat him. “Hold me, please,” she told him. The words choked her, but he was the only one available. She couldn’t go back into their prison until she had control again because she couldn’t ask anyone there to help carry this. “Just hold me.”

He obeyed. He pulled her up against his chest and smoothed her hair. He didn’t say anything.

When she’d cried herself out, she gave herself a few minutes to pretend that Warren hadn’t lied to her and hadn’t hurt anyone she loved. Then she made herself raise her hands and push him away.

He went.

“This shit you’re doing,” she told him, “this thing you think you want-- This is what it looks like.” She met his eyes.

He looked at the floor. “Go wash your face.”

Magenta took a deep breath and didn’t tell Warren he was an asshole. Judging by how he stood, he already knew. He cared, but he also wasn’t going to change course. 

“We’re going to have to do this again,” she said calmly as she stood. “Over and over.” She could feel her emotional armor reassembling itself around her.

A slight change in Warren’s expression told Magenta that he’d seen the armor going on. 

She pretended that she hadn’t noticed and went and washed her face. She still hadn’t made up her mind about what would be best for the rest of them, but she really, really wanted to see Warren bleed and to hear him scream. It wasn’t as important as her friends, but it was going to be a life goal.

 

**Sunday 13 November 2005 through Saturday 3 December 2005**

Warren did give them TV, satellite rather than cable. Apparently nobody’d wanted to run cable to a rock floating in the sky. Still, they had CNN. They watched more Sesame Street than they did news, but now they could see that there was, in fact, a war between the escaped villains and everyone else. The civilians weren't feeling it yet, but they'd noticed.

Knowing helped, though. Zach was pulling himself back together.

Magenta wasn't sure if it was the TV or if Warren had let Zach go after a punching bag, but that particular thread of worry had less tension than it had had before.

And all it cost was acting lovey-dovey with Warren. He hadn’t tried to make it real, and she hadn’t let him see her cry again. The first time only worked because he knew she hadn’t wanted him to know. A second time… Even if it might work, she couldn’t do it.

Warren gave them chocolate, and they gorged on it.

Magenta was grateful for the calories. She’d been losing weight. 

Warren gave them paint, and Ethan started a mural. 

All of them appreciated having something in the place that didn’t look gray.

Warren gave them cut flowers. 

Layla pulled poison out of them to make a brew that satisfied her. One to put the knife to Warren’s throat.

Tonight.


	4. Ethan: Brave at the Shore

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Kim Unsong's “Lighthouse.”
> 
> Some part of my mind has decided that Ethan is a history nerd. Well, possibly just an omnivorous scholar in a world where certain types of history are easier to dig into into safely than, say, the hard sciences are.

Ethan worried about the others every bit as much as they worried about each other. None of them seemed quite as worried about him, but that was fine. He’d had years of practice at not letting anything show. Being angry or frightened or anything but quietly under his own control, all of that added to the risks of being a black man.

Ethan wasn’t Luke Cage. If someone shot him, it would hurt, and he’d probably die. He didn’t know anyone-- not personally-- who had been, but it was a thing he knew so deep he didn’t remember ever not knowing it. There were always people with too much power who would hurt him because he was there, and there were always people with only a little more than he had who would hurt him to make themselves bigger.

Ethan also wasn’t Magenta. He didn’t use his own sharp edges as weapons or shields, and he wasn’t willing to sell himself. He might not have a choice, but he knew what being owned could-- probably would-- cost. He wasn’t sure when he’d learned that either, but he knew it. He couldn’t actually think of anything that would make him put chains on himself, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. The chains Warren wanted weren’t physical which Ethan thought might be worse.

Warren wanted Ethan to buy in and believe that he could be one of the people with power who could hurt-- or not-- everyone else. Warren was offering a neat little toolbox-- Part of buying in would be for Ethan to help build his new master’s house.

Zach and Layla had both always been safe from this sort of shit, so they’d never thought about what they’d do when it happened. They hadn’t had the constant small but cumulative reminders of the power they didn’t have and could never have. 

Zach was a white boy with money. He didn’t like being a sidekick, but he never let that touch his certainty that he was valuable, that he’d be safe, that he could trust the world to be kind.

Layla-- Ethan was a little less certain about Layla. She’d chosen to be a sidekick, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t simply because the whole thing was a crock. But she also wasn’t worried about the world in general. She was watching for specific threats, threats exactly like Warren. If she hadn’t been, she’d be in as much trouble as Zach was.

Her problem was that she’d really trusted Warren and hadn’t quite let go of the idea that there was something there to salvage.

She was probably right that there was something, but Ethan didn’t think that trying for that was going to get them anything they’d be happy to see. At least, it wouldn’t if they used the tools Warren was offering them because Warren liked being who he was.

When Ethan had realized that they were trapped at Homecoming-- and he thought he’d realized it sooner than the others had-- he’d started pulling pieces of himself inside and putting them deep, where nothing could touch them. There was an ocean in his soul that could swallow anything. Being underwater didn’t mean those bits of him were gone or inaccessible to him; it just meant no one else could take them, not unless he choose to hand them over.

Even the prospect of the girls’ locker room for the rest of his life wouldn’t make him do that. Death had nothing on that. He’d bend. Up to a point. He just intended to hold onto who he was.

His friends might-- probably would-- make a different choice if they couldn’t escape. That wasn’t a thing he could do for them. He was pretty sure that, if the plan failed, it wouldn’t matter what Warren did to retaliate. However cruel he was or wasn’t, Zach was going to kneel and make whatever promises Warren demanded.

Layla would make promises, but she’d word them very, very carefully, and she wouldn’t tell Warren what she could do. Whatever happened after that wouldn’t be good for Warren. It also wouldn’t be good for Layla.

Layla understood that, when you couldn’t control most of your life, you had to focus on the bits you could. She just didn’t understand that some of the things you could control were poison to the soul.

Ethan wondered if it would be better, if they failed, if one of them told Warren that Layla had a hero class power. Warren knowing-- or his parents knowing-- might shift things enough to protect her from some damage. 

His stomach turned at the idea of selling her that way. The first time he’d realized it might be necessary, he’d had to retreat to a toilet stall so that the others wouldn’t see him lose it.

Maybe, if it came to that, Zach would tell Warren. Then Ethan wouldn’t have to. Ethan would still have the guilt of thinking he would, but he wouldn’t actually have done it.

Magenta-- Ethan tried not to think about what would happen to Magenta. She thought she’d be fine. She thought she was fine now because most of her broken places had been there before Warren. She wasn’t, and anything Ethan could do about it would make Zach and Layla realize that something was wrong. Anything Ethan could _try_ to do about it.

Magenta thought she needed to be broken in order to keep doing what had to be done; Ethan wasn’t sure she was wrong.

He just knew that the monster she wanted to make of herself wasn’t going to go back into a box in the bottom of her mind, not after it had been so horribly and completely necessary.

They were all four going to need so fucking much therapy.

Ethan hadn’t let any of the others realize how much that damned water bottle scared him. Once the lid was on, he was trapped until someone outside opened it. He wasn’t sure if he’d starve to death in his other form or just slowly go mad. He could get inside and not move or scream when the lid went on. He’d done it over and over and over. He just wasn’t ever going to forget what he was risking.

At least learning how to get out of the bottle had taught him that he could actually move in that form. He could see a lot of possibilities in that. He could cohere and adhere. Maybe he could climb. Maybe he could move like one of those blobby little things-- amoebas? Was that the right name?

**24 November 2005 - Thanksgiving**

Ethan had had a vague sense that Thanksgiving must be coming because Homecoming had happened at the very end of October. They hadn’t tracked the dates all that well even once they had TV and really could have. They just really hadn’t wanted to because Thanksgiving meant they’d been trapped a long time and because Thanksgiving was a reminder of how much they would lose if their plan failed.

If Warren kept them, none of them were going to see their families again, and they all knew that their plan was vulnerable on several fronts. All it would really take was someone willing to risk Warren’s life if it meant not letting him get kidnapped.

Warren announced Thanksgiving the day before by walking into the locker room. “Dinner for the five of us in here tomorrow.” He eyed at the rows of lockers and at the door into the shower room. “Somewhere in here.”

Ethan suspected that he was realizing that there wasn’t even a table in the place. They could put up a card table in the showers or in the office if Warren was willing to risk it. Which meant the office because they couldn’t risk anyone else seeing Layla’s garden and laboratory. Which meant letting Warren into their bedroom.

Warren wanted them to think of him as family. Warren wanted to find a way further into their space because they hadn’t ever allowed him anywhere but the entrance corridor. He could have insisted, could have threatened or even hurt them, but that wouldn’t get him what he wanted. Thanksgiving just gave him a wedge to get the door open.

If they hadn’t had secrets in the showers, not one of them would have let Warren inside the office. It was the closest thing they had to a bedroom, and having had Warren in there was going to make it really, really uncomfortable sleeping-- or doing anything else-- there, afterward, and really, really hard to tell him he wasn’t allowed inside again.

Warren’s power was fire, but his persistence was more like water eroding everyone’s memories of what ‘normal’ actually was. Ethan had been gradually losing his optimism about his own long term prospects. He hadn’t let any of the others realize it because they were depending on him to be their anchor.

Layla thought it wouldn’t be more than another week for her poison. Ethan could hold on that long.

It wasn’t actually the most uncomfortable Thanksgiving in the history of the world, but Ethan thought it might have been in the top ten. The four of them tried pretty damned hard to give Warren the pleasant, friendly meal he seemed to want. 

The fact that they were all sitting on the linoleum because folding chairs would require Warren having bodyguards kind of underlined that it wasn’t friendly and couldn’t really be. Warren couldn’t have missed that, but he seemed to think the rest of them would.

Ethan wasn’t sure, though, if Warren realized that them having moved all of their things out of the room in order to clear the floor was kind of a message that the office wasn’t the space it had been, the space it was at other times when Warren wasn’t in it.

Magenta had said that Warren probably didn’t understand expecting to feel safe in the place where he slept, not given his parents.

Which had made Ethan wonder if Magenta ever felt safe where she slept. They’d never had a study session at her home, and she’d never talked about her family. That seemed like a huge thing for them to have overlooked.

They ate the food off of fancy looking plastic plates. Ethan was more used to seeing that sort of material used for his cousins’ Dora the Explorer dishes than anything meant for adults, but these were light blue with birds and flowers. He bet that Warren could melt whatever the dishes were made of in under a tenth of a second. Ceramic would have been much more dangerous.

Zach talked about distant and eccentric relatives, finding amusing anecdotes in family gatherings past.

Ethan doubted that Warren missed how Zach avoided talking about his parents or his sisters, but really it wasn’t as if Warren hadn’t already known that they might be vulnerable that way. If he was going to threaten their families, he would have already because it would have worked.

Layla talked about the bedtime stories of sparrows and of dogs and of her mother sharing them with her.

Layla was taking a smaller risk than Zach was. Her mother was already fighting Barron Battle in ways that got to CNN. None of them thought that Warren and his parents would forget that Debra Williams existed.

Layla never mentioned her father once.

Ethan talked about the history of the holiday and then about history more generally. History was a big topic. He could fill a lot of time with that.

Warren didn’t say much, and Magenta said nothing at all. She just kept her eyes on Warren as if her focus might protect them all.

The food was better than usual but wasn’t really what Ethan, Layla, or Zach thought should go with the holiday. None of them said anything, but they were all three thinking of what they’d normally eat and with whom. 

Ethan hadn’t felt anywhere near that homesick since right after Homecoming. He usually kept that under water.

Layla’s tofurkey looked like it had been scorched and then scraped, and Magenta later identified everything else as having come from Boston Market.

“I know Boston Market Thanksgiving food. That was Boston Market,” Magenta said as they moved their things back into the office after Warren finally left. She hesitated. “Well, I don’t think they do tofurkey, and I don’t think they’d have let _that_ over the counter. Too much risk of bad reviews or-- worse-- photographs online.”

“Just as well,” Zach said. “If it had been really good, I’d probably have thrown the mashed potatoes at him.”

Ethan wondered how Warren would have reacted to that. He supposed it depended on which response Warren thought would get him what he wanted. It might have been a food fight. It might have been laughter. It might have been loss of the TV for a while. 

Warren had to know that burning one of them for something petty would make getting what he seemed to want harder. He wanted inside. Magenta’d pointed it out first, but Ethan was sure now that she was right.

It was kind of pathetic that Warren Peace, in spite of having living and supposedly loving parents, observed Thanksgiving in a concrete box with four people who desperately wanted to be somewhere else. What did it say about Warren that this was an appealing option?

Ethan really hoped he wouldn’t need to figure out the answers. He really, really wanted Warren not to be important any more. 

They still might get that.

 

**Saturday, 3 December 2005**

The night that changed everything, the night they poisoned Warren, Magenta took Ethan through the vents last. She took Layla’s poison through first. Then she stole weapons. Finally, she came back and got him. The trip through the ducts to Warren’s room felt like it lasted longer than he’d been alive. The bottle rolling and bumping into things told him that Magenta was still there, that they were still moving, but it felt like eternity.

He’d still take being trapped in the bottle over being owned.

When the lid finally came off and Magenta whispered, “Time, Ethan,” he reached and stretched to become human again without leaving anything stuck in the bottle. That hurt. It was also how he’d discovered that liquifying and reforming again healed broken bones.

Magenta handed him some sort of ray gun. “I hit him with this already. It’s a stunner-paralysis sort of thing. At least, that’s what Medulla’s label said. I’ve got a freeze ray.”

Ethan nodded and looked around. A small lamp illuminated the space. Warren lay sprawled on his bed with a sheet up to his shoulders. The bed was basically just a better version of the cot that the nurse had had, back when Sky High was a school. There were two paintings on the wall. One was an oil of something like the dancing flame people from “Night on Bald Mountain.” It wasn’t the same, but it was the same idea. The other painting was watercolor and delicate enough in details that Ethan thought he’d need better light to judge it. He was almost certain they had been created by different artists.

Ethan wondered which one of them Warren had picked. Maybe they’d both been given to him and were all he had. Warren had been owned from birth. Warren had and was still choosing the paths of control that would poison his soul.

Warren thought that forcing them to be his friends would purge the poison.

Ethan could feel very sorry for Warren and still be completely willing to gut him. Layla thought she’d sent him with Magenta to make sure she didn’t kill anyone. Ethan was actually there to make sure that people who had to die, died without Magenta having to do it.

“If we have this,” Ethan raised the stunner, “why are we going for poisoning Warren?” Stunning the necessary guards to open the door to the girls’ locker room and then arming everybody and running like hell had at least as much chance of success as this plan. More, probably.

Magenta’s shoulders sagged a little. “I thought about it, but--” She pointed toward one of the walls. “There are two dozen bassinets about four rooms down. If we have to leave them, that’s one thing, but we can’t make that many trips back and forth if we’re sneaking, and… We have to try.” She fixed her eyes on Warren. “Just… Don’t tell Layla about them if we can’t. Not ever.”

Oh. Yeah. That mattered.

“Think we can get enough of this down him while he’s unconscious?” Magenta nodded toward Warren. “Layla said twenty minutes to symptoms, three hours to irreversible damage, five hours to death.”

Ethan had doubts about everything but the symptoms part. Layla hadn’t taken weeks over it because the killing part was hard. It was the duration that was hard, that and making the symptoms bad enough that Warren would believe he was dying.

Ethan ended up breaking into the supply cupboard that was left over from when the space had been the infirmary. There were two prescriptions with droppers. Ethan took both and washed them as thoroughly as he could. One still smelled of something other than soap, so he offered Magenta the other one.

Then, Ethan sat on Warren’s legs and pinched his nose to force him to open his mouth.

Magenta dripped Layla’s potion into Warren’s mouth. When Warren finally swallowed, they both sighed with relief. Then, Magenta discarded the dropper and poured the fluid into Warren’s mouth a little at a time.

“Take too long with the dropper,” she muttered.

Ethan had understood that, so he simply shrugged. “Just give him some time to breathe, too.”

Warren started to struggle halfway through, but he wasn’t aware enough to throw off Ethan’s weight, not given that Ethan was expecting him to try.

“Stun him again?” Ethan asked the question through clenched teeth. He was almost certain that Magenta was going to refuse because she wanted-- needed-- Warren to know what was happening.

She shook her head and poured more of the murky liquid down Warren’s throat.

Warren coughed and choked and tried to spit the liquid out.

Ethan forced Warren’s jaw shut. After Warren finally swallowed again, Ethan looked up at Magenta. “Half is probably enough.”

She shook her head. “Layla said she didn’t have a way to concentrate it, that that’s why it needs a lot. Better too much than too little.”

“Give me your knife.”

The look she gave him said that he wasn’t supposed to know she had one. 

He probably also wasn’t supposed to realize that she had more than one. She’d forgotten that he knew her. She would certainly have weapons that would hurt in ways that wouldn’t wear off in minutes, weapons that could kill.

Ethan put Magenta’s knife to Warren’s throat. When he saw awareness coming into Warren’s eyes, he said, “I can get this in before you can kill me. Might be we both die. Might not. Care to risk it?”

Warren went still.

“Good,” Ethan told him. “Magenta could still get Zach and Layla out if we were both dead, but she’d have to leave the babies. She doesn’t want to.”

Warren’s face said that he didn’t quite believe that Ethan would do it but also wasn’t sufficiently sure that Ethan wouldn’t to take the risk.

Ethan was pretty sure that Warren didn’t understand that Ethan held the knife because Ethan would be able to take it away again later. There was a very real chance that Magenta would sink it deep even though that wasn’t the plan.

Maybe Ethan would let Magenta sink it into some non-lethal bit of Warren’s anatomy later on. He had suspicions about the chocolate and the flowers. Whatever Warren had been doing with Magenta was pretty certainly worth more than a hand or a foot, but it would be something.

Magenta held up the bottle that still contained part of the poison. “You’ve had enough of this for irreversible damage.” She sounded certain enough that Ethan almost believed her. “You’re going to drink the rest because I don’t want to leave enough for any of your asshole minions to analyze it. Layla’s got the antidote. You get it once we’re all on the ground.”

Warren’s head didn’t move, but his eyes went from Ethan’s face to Magenta’s and back.

Ethan saw the moment that Warren realized that, even if Ethan might not be willing to kill, Magenta was ready to do worse. Ethan looked at Magenta and said, “He can drink, or I can sit here with the knife while you get everyone out.” He shifted his gaze to Warren. “No guarantees that, if I went down, I wouldn’t take you with me.” He smiled minutely.

Warren’s eyes widened. He obviously did believe that Ethan would die to get the others out. Which was good because Ethan would.

Any of them would.

“If he doesn’t drink, we could just sit here and watch what happens.” Magenta’s bitterness put a vicious twist on the words.

Ethan wasn’t sure if they were doing bad-cop good-cop or bad-cop worse-cop. Sitting and watching would be a waste of precious time. If Warren didn’t know that, it would be because most of his mind was on Ethan and the knife.

Ethan could see the movement of Warren’s throat under the blade as Warren swallowed. Ethan didn’t like how good it felt to see Warren frightened. He also suspected that Warren wasn’t nearly as frightened as he ought to be.

All four of them had been good people before Warren locked them in. Three of the four of them had thought they were, then, and all four of them had found out, after, that there weren’t many lines that at least one of them wouldn’t cross. Not the same lines, but someone would.

They shouldn’t have to know that.

Ethan raised his eyebrows at Warren. “You going to drink? I really recommend it.”

Warren licked his lips. His ‘yes’ was almost inaudible.

Ethan wasn’t sure why that felt like the world dropping out from under him, but he kept his hand steady. “Open your mouth, then. Magenta will pour it in.” He glanced at Magenta. “A little at a time.”

Magenta gave him a glare in return that told him both that she already knew that and that she had been about to forget. Magenta was angrier at Warren than the rest of them were put together. That was kind of terrifying because the rest of them were pretty damned angry.

Getting the rest of the fluid into Warren took less than a minute. Then Magenta took the bottle into the bathroom to wash it. “Flush the water you wash it with,” Ethan recommended. “Harder to find traces of anything in that than in the drain from the sink.”

“You really think I don’t know that?” Magenta replied with just a hint of acid. She smiled at Ethan, probably wanting to take the sting out of the words.

Ethan saw Warren realize that Magenta was only angry at him. “Yeah,” Ethan said softly, knowing that the running water in the bathroom would keep Magenta from hearing him. “That’s a thing to worry about, too. Just not this second. Right now, it’s enough to focus on the next thing that might kill you.”

Warren’s lips moved but only the barest whisper of sound came out. “That would be you, right?”

“At this point? Not so much.” Ethan pulled the knife away from Warren’s throat. He stood and watched as Warren pushed himself to a sitting position. “Layla, on the other hand… She said dead in five hours. I don’t think that’s enough time for your people to work out which of the water bottles hidden in the locker room has the antidote.”

Warren’s left hand circled his throat as if he was surprised Ethan hadn’t cut him. His right hand raised toward Ethan and ignited. “She’d trade the antidote for either one of you.”

Ethan kept his eyes on Warren’s face. “She might,” he admitted. He thought-- he hoped-- that the flames weren’t as strong as usual. “She also-- If she gives you that, what happens after-- We’re not stupid. You’ve got an audience, so if we rebel, you have to crush us. Layla’s soft, but she’s not soft enough not to want to take you with us.”

Ethan didn’t realize that the odd, new expression on Warren’s face was pain until Warren doubled over with a moan. The flame on Warren’s hand went out, but tiny flames started flickering over his body.

Ethan only burned his hand a little in pulling Warren off the bed and dumping him on the tiled floor, well away from anything easily flammable. “Magenta!” He raised his voice to be sure she heard. “Wet towels please. More than one if there are any.”

Chances were good that someone outside had heard that, too, but that had to happen at some point. Ethan was pretty sure that the flickering was a much stronger sign of Warren being really ill than anything Warren could have said about being in pain, and he was prepared to use it as evidence that the poison was real. He was just a little worried that Layla’d gotten the dose wrong or misjudged how it would affect Warren.

Ethan was almost certain that the risk of Warren burning the building down around them, completely unintentionally, hadn’t been on the list of problems they’d considered.

Magenta came out with two dripping towels. She threw one on top of Warren, handed the second to Ethan then stripped Warren’s bed of sheets and blanket. A minute later, she had them wet as well.

Together, they got the sopping wet blanket wrapped around Warren’s upper body.

Warren was aware enough to glare at them.

Magenta exhaled heavily enough that her breath moved a strand of her hair. “Should have remembered that Layla never poisoned Warren before.” She sounded like she thought it was funny.

Ethan shook his head. “Pretty sure Layla never poisoned anyone before.” The flames on Warren’s face seemed to have subsided, so Ethan poked him on the forehead. “That’s on you, Warren. Hope you feel the weight.”

“He knows,” Magenta said. “He just doesn’t feel bad enough about it to change anything.”

Warren was aware enough to understand that. He snarled and tried to get to his feet.

Magenta said, “Might as well,” and got her shoulder under Warren’s arm just as someone knocked lightly on the door.

Warren inhaled sharply but didn’t say anything.

“We’re coming out!” Magenta said very loudly. “Warren’s sick!”

And that told Ethan that there really was something more behind the flowers and the chocolate. That told Ethan that Magenta thought the person outside might believe she belonged in Warren’s room while Warren was sleeping.

They were all going to need so very fucking much therapy.

Warren managed to form words once they were out in the hall. “Get the other two prisoners,” he told the two women outside his door.

Magenta elbowed him. “They need to know why. I’m not getting fucking shot on the tarmac.”

Warren glared at her, but his knees started to buckle which really undermined the threat.

Ethan pressed up against Warren on the other side to keep him from going down. “I think we’d all rather not get shot anywhere.” He tugged a little until Warren and Magenta followed him. He knew there wasn’t anyone behind them in Warren’s room, not yet, but having something solid at his back was still a surprisingly large relief.

Ethan looked from one gaping woman to the other. “Poison. Antidote available. _After_ we land.”

“Do it,” Warren said, the words sounding like he was chewing gravel. A puff of flame came out of his mouth as he finished speaking.

One woman looked at the other who said, “Above our pay grade.”

Ethan felt heat through the rapidly drying blanket. “Our friends,” he said, “the babies, and a steady supply of wet blankets.”

“And a school bus,” Magenta added. “We’re not jumping.”

One woman turned and sprinted toward the cafeteria. 

The other stared for a moment then said, “Blankets down the hall. Not sure about getting them wet.”

“I have faith in your creativity,” Ethan said. He really hoped they were guessing right about the automated systems on the buses. Not being able to take off would suck worse than crashing when they landed.

Warren nodded as the blanket wrapping him began to smoke. By the time they’d switched it out for a new one, Ethan and Magenta both had a few burns, and their clothing was starting to char. Ethan had traded worrying about automated systems for worrying about whether or not they could take off before Warren set the bus on fire.

Taking off without Warren on board was a non-starter. If they were dying in flames either way, they’d be trying the way with at least a prayer of success. You went for the Hail Mary pass because you were out of options that weren’t just sitting on your ass and waiting to lose.

The price of losing this one was way, way too high.

They went through several blankets before Zach and Layla joined them, each carrying about ten water bottles. Each of those was labeled with a code. Only Layla knew which one was the ‘antidote.’

Ethan was still betting on there being no antidote because there was no lethal poison. Poison, yes, certainly. Lethal poison, not at all likely. Not so much because Layla wouldn’t kill or wouldn’t kill Warren as because Warren dead would be a much bigger problem.

None of them had ever forgotten about Warren’s parents.

Layla clicked her tongue unhappily when she saw Warren and said, “Well, I didn’t expect _that_.” She walked over and put a hand on his forehead. When she pulled back, her hand showed no signs of burns.

Ethan would have sworn he felt a ripple of power going through Warren’s body, and the next blanket lasted fifteen minutes.

The decrease in volume of flame meant really being able to see how miserably sick Warren looked. Ethan wondered if the flames were Warren’s powers trying to purge whatever toxins they’d fed him. Maybe this was how Warren reacted to bad tacos.

A couple of different minions offered to fly the bus, and Ethan seriously considered it. He could see that the others seriously considered it, too.

Each time, Warren shook his head before anyone else could say anything.

Ethan thought that was really weird because, however sick and in pain he was, Warren had to know that it could get worse. If the bus driver worked for his parents, he’d have one person on his side when they hit the ground.

Then Warren started vomiting, and Ethan was too busy to consider the matter further.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m having some unexpected health issues to deal with, so I’m going to post the rest of this story today. I’ll decide what to do with the rest of the series later.


	5. Zach: Their Departure Irreversible

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Kim Unsong's "Natural."
> 
> Zach ended up the least well defined of the quartet in my head. There are more scraps of detail about him in canon than there are for Ethan and Magenta, and, somehow, that made getting grip on his character harder. Zach came more into focus when I realized he was the oldest in a family with more than two kids.

**Sunday 4 December 2005, before dawn**

One of them would have had to be the one to crack first. Zach tried to convince himself that there was no shame in being that one, not when they were all going to eventually, but the other three, his friends, reshaped themselves and found ways to fight.

Zach couldn’t do that. He couldn’t fit through the vents like Magenta. He couldn’t transcend the limits of his power like Layla. He couldn’t even manage chill and calm like Ethan. Of the four of them, he was the one who remained terrified and helpless and human. 

He was the kid who could glow.

Magenta’s other form didn’t even look like a guinea pig anymore. Her limbs were longer, and her paws were edging toward hands. She could leap from the floor into an opening high in the wall and change form in the process. Zach supposed she’d simply had to figure it out in order to get back to the rest of them. Over and over.

Layla was the only one who thought Magenta never left the ducts.

Ethan had learned how to move in his other form. He was slow, but Zach was pretty sure that would change with practice. Or Ethan would just find ways to make it work anyway. He could cling to walls for a few seconds at a time, and he could break his own bones and then heal them by shifting to puddle and back. He could probably heal other injuries. He’d just never had reason to try.

Coach Boomer might not understand that as hero track, but Zach saw it clearly.

Layla-- Well, Zach had no idea what the fuck was going on with Layla, but he was pretty sure she’d set herself on the road to becoming something more like a god than like a hero. He wasn’t sure she was even still human. She didn’t look different. She still sounded like herself.

Magenta and Ethan saw it, too, but neither of them ever admitted it was a place she wouldn’t have gone if they hadn’t needed her to.

Zach’s friends had all leveled up before the boss fight. He wasn’t sure he’d even earned any XP.

Still, when he watched Sky High getting smaller behind them, the guilt and shame stopped nagging at him so badly. He’d find a way to contribute later. Getting to the ground wasn’t going to be the end of it.

None of the others thought it would be, but they’d put so much into escaping that they didn’t have anything left.

So Zach guessed that would be his job. It wouldn’t take superpowers.

“We can’t go home,” he announced almost as soon as they were in the air. He was driving because his Wii games were closer to driving than anything the other three had done. He was pretty sure Magenta was giving him a no-shit-Sherlock look, but he didn’t even bother to look. “I think--” He started trying to set a course. He’d known these coordinates for years.

Then Sky High blew up behind them, and Zach was very busy trying to avoid chunks of rock taking out anything the bus actually needed for staying airborne. 

“What the fuck did you _do_?” Warren’s voice was ragged from coughing and vomiting, but the anger in his words was clear.

“Not us,” Layla said. Zach caught a glimpse of her in the mirror. She was flexing and clenching her hands. “I was going to, but it wouldn’t have looked like that.”

Zach had a vivid enough imagination to have a pretty good idea of what Layla’s means of destruction would have looked like. “It was a goddamn bomb,” he growled without looking back at where Warren was huddled under a rapidly drying blanket. “If any of us could build something like that--” He shook his head.

“If we could, we’d be hero track,” Ethan finished for him.

Zach thought that Sky High exploding right at that moment was one hell of a gift horse. He didn’t plan to count teeth by asking Magenta how she’d done it.

Even he was observant enough to realize that she hoped they’d think it was Gwen and sheer coincidence. “Your Technopath must have missed one of Gwen’s bombs. Done anything recently to piss her off?” Zach put grim force into the words in an effort to tell Warren that he’d damned well better shut up about the whole topic.

Then a spray of rocks hit the side of the bus, and all of the babies started crying in terror. Ethan, Magenta, and Layla focused on trying to soothe them while Zach worked on trying to find the Strongholds’ vacation cabin. He thought-- he hoped-- there was room enough to land the bus there.

If he took down a tree or three, Layla could fix it. Hell, she might be able to get them out of the way and then back over the bus to hide it from overhead. The cabin had enough defenses that no one who chased them-- if there was anyone left to do it-- would be able to get inside, but not being found at all would be better.

As long as he and Layla remembered all the access codes. Getting shot out of the sky by friendly fire-- even automated friendly fire-- would be a made it through the war and then choked to death on a pretzel moment. They’d take about an hour getting there, and they’d have to figure out what to do with twenty four babies with only enough diapers for three changes each and enough formula for a day or two.

Layla and Magenta dosed the babies with benadryl and argued about whether or not that made them horrible people. Ethan pointed out that having even half of the brats asleep would mean being able to hear themselves think.

Magenta snapped at Ethan about his use of the term ‘brats,’ and Ethan laughed.

Zach relaxed a little. Warren wasn’t saying anything more about the bomb, and Layla and Ethan were showing Magenta that they didn’t judge her for it.

There was no way Magenta could actually believe they didn’t know. He hoped she also realized that they wouldn’t tell anyone. There wasn’t any evidence against her but the timing, and only five people knew exactly when it had happened. All anyone could prove was that it must have happened after they escaped.

Zach didn’t trust the autopilot enough to leave it unsupervised, so he called to the others. “Sky High’s gone, but I’m willing to bet there’s a tracker on this sucker, probably more than one. See if you-- Ethan and Magenta-- can get that out of Warren. And Layla-- I need your memories to go with mine. You’re better at remembering Mrs Stronghold’s jokes.” If they could land, his handprint or Layla’s could get them inside. Most of it was underground, so it was bigger than it looked, big enough for all of them three times over. 

He didn’t let himself think, not in words, that he hoped to find Will there. He was too afraid of jinxing himself.

“In a minute, Zach. We’ve got time.” Layla sat down next to Warren and offered him a bottle. “This one’s just water. If you can keep it down, you’ll feel a little better.” She sat there for almost a minute. Then she patted Warren’s blanket covered arm and stood. “You’ll live.” She moved to stand behind Zach and put a hand on his shoulder.

He could almost feel the power just below her skin. “I think the cabin’s the best odds. Unless you know somewhere else?”

She might. Her mother had different connections than his parents did.

“Nothing that would be better,” she said softly. “They’ve been building longer than anybody else, and we’re going to need the space.” She squeezed his shoulder. Her next words were quiet enough that Zach was sure no one else heard. “I can keep it together long enough to get Warren locked in somewhere safe, but then… I’m going to need a few days. I’ll show you where to find the emergency accounts and the stasis supply room. The Strongholds didn’t do upkeep on those because they were never needed, but Dad--” Her voice broke slightly.

Zach nodded tightly. He’d met her father. The man wasn’t paranoid exactly. There just wasn’t a better word for it.

But he’d been _right_.

Zach couldn’t handle that just then. He’d already looked at it from a dozen angles. Mr Williams might or might not have been wrong about the causal event-- combining Technopaths with computers-- but he’d been right about the part after that.

Layla was likely a first. She wasn’t going to be last.

Layla’d gone well beyond hero class in strength and breadth of power. They didn’t have a word for what she was now, not unless they wanted to call her a demigod-- Zach thought he needed a better word, but he couldn’t think of one-- so the world was damned lucky that she was rock solid on the being a good person part. Zach-- all of them, really-- ought to be terrified, but she was _Layla_.

Zach didn’t ever remember not knowing Layla.

Layla had just gambled everything and won. She could go on being benevolent. What would a person with her powers have become if--

Zach shook his head to get rid of that thought. It didn’t go anywhere he wanted to be. “Diapers?” he asked.

“Not enough.” Layla laughed softly. “You’ll have to go shopping. Or send Ethan.”

That would be a hell of an uptick in local diaper purchasing if someone was smart enough to be watching for that. If Zach had had any desire to find Royal Pain’s hideout, he’d have looked for diaper sales.

“We get cloth,” he told her. “That’s one purchase and a ton of laundry. Water use won’t be as obviously us.”

Layla went still for a moment. Then she squeezed his shoulder again. “I’m glad one of us can think of that.” Her voice sounded a little tight, and Zach couldn’t figure out why until she added, “You just-- That sounded like something Dad would say.”

Zach cleared his throat, but there really weren’t words for answering that. “I do need the codes.”

“The first approach is the first day of spring break for our senior year, day, month, year, all in words rather than digits.” Layla managed to put just enough twist on the words that Zach understood that he wasn’t the only one who saw that as a problem.

“Fuck my life,” he muttered.

“Nothing starts shooting as long as we get the year and month right. Three tries.”

“Sky High spring break is always late April,” Warren said. “It’s deliberately later than everyone else’s.” The words were flat and factual with no judgment or ingratiating pleading.

Zach twitched as he worked at not turning and snarling at the other boy. He’d wanted-- still did if he was honest-- Warren to know what it meant to be a prisoner, and now Warren was. Zach took a steadying breath then glanced back at Layla. “We buying that?” he asked quietly.

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she sighed. “I don’t have a better idea.” She turned to look at Warren. “I think… He’s not spiteful enough to be lying. He knows that trying to screw us on this isn’t going to make anything better for him, so it would have to be spite.”

“If I wanted to be spiteful,” Warren said, “I’d have made sure word got out that I had you and that you weren’t babies. Stronghold’s not the only one who would have come running.”

“At that point,” Ethan said levelly, “you were trying to recruit us. You couldn’t do both. I’m not saying you’re lying now, just pointing out the hole in the argument.”

“He’s not lying,” Magenta said. “They didn’t change anything on the walls in the staff lounge. Some OCD teacher papered a wall with the calendars for the next ten years. There were little red Xs through every day up through Homecoming, and the dates for vacations were in gold. Pretty sure someone was counting down to retirement. What? It wasn’t useful information before.”

Warren started to laugh then coughed and wheezed, sounding like he couldn’t breathe.

Layla sighed. “That would be next.” She headed back toward Warren. Zach didn’t try to track what she did, but he heard her say to Warren, “I didn’t have time to smooth everything out, and really, that would have required testing it all on you. I didn’t think you’d volunteer.”

There was a catch in Warren’s wheezing as if he’d tried to start laughing again.

Zach really wanted to punch Warren. “I still need to know about trackers.”

By the time they got near enough to the cabin to need the spring break dates, they’d found three trackers. One of them was futilely broadcasting their location back to Sky High. It would have been an actual problem if Sky High had still existed because it was part of the software running the autopilot; getting rid of the signal would require Zach to control everything manually, and he was pretty sure he’d kill them all that way. The other two were pingback devices that wouldn’t do anything unless they got an activating signal. Both were stuck in the wheel wells.

Layla used some sort of vine to reach out through a window and retrieve the trackers. “Don’t touch any of this with bare skin,” she told them as she studied the devices. “Poison ivy. I didn’t have another vine seed left.”

Zach guessed that she was somehow immune. It went with everything else. Over the thrum of the bus’s engine, he heard a crackling and popping and guessed that Layla’d destroyed the damned things. Probably with mold or something like that that came from nowhere.

He knew it wasn’t from nowhere. He just didn’t like being reminded that he was breathing that shit every time he inhaled. He didn’t want to know about unnatural crap in his food either. Not when he didn’t have a choice about eating or breathing or… Some things were better unknown.

“Drink this,” Layla told Warren. “That may have been my only vine left, but I’ve still got enough seeds to fuck you up if I have to.” There was a certain vicious satisfaction in the words that told all of them how very angry Layla was at Warren.

In case any of them had missed it.

“Layla--”

“No.” Her words were cold enough to snap tree limbs. “No justifications. No apologies. Why you did it doesn’t matter. What you intended doesn’t matter. If I-- if any of us-- wanted to do something permanent to you none of us-- not a single one-- would try to stop it. We _might_ patch you up afterward.”

Zach really hoped that Warren understood what it meant that Layla couldn’t forgive him.

A device on Zach’s right crackled and said, “Sky High 12, this is Sky High 21. Do you copy?”

Zach stared at it for a few seconds as if it might bite him. He thought he remembered their driver talking into that thing. Maybe. He closed his eyes for a second. Yes. The driver had had it in his hand. Zach coaxed it loose from the dashboard, half afraid of breaking it and half afraid of making it do something he didn’t intend. He looked at it and was relieved to discover that there was a big orange button on the side that said ‘send.’ The top looked kind of microphone-ish.

Zach took a deep breath. Bus 21 had been the one he and Layla and Ethan and Will had taken to school every morning, so he gambled. “Sky High 21 natives on Sky High 12,” he said, enunciating carefully. He hoped that was clear enough. He hoped no one else was listening. He hoped--

“Ron Wilson, Bus Driver, here.” The person on the other end sounded happy. 

Zach recognized the intonation and energy, and he smiled. He didn’t say what he wanted to which was ‘well, thank God for that.’ He couldn’t imagine Ron Wilson working for Gwen or for Barron Battle.

“You licensed?” Ron Wilson asked.

“Oh, hell no,” Zach replied honestly. “Freshman. Not even a learner’s permit.”

“Just you?”

Zach hesitated. “One driver. Twenty… eight passengers.” He decided against ‘twenty seven passengers and a prisoner.’ Even if this was Ron Wilson, was a friend, someone else might be listening. After a moment, he added, “Most of the passengers are… extra breakable.”

“We’ll see about getting you down easy, son.”

Zach hadn’t realized that his fear was that obvious, but it felt really nice to have someone who wasn’t Layla or Ethan or Magenta offering him reassurance. Especially an adult.

Warren had said he was offering comfort and reassurance. Repeatedly. Zach had wanted to believe him, but wanting didn’t make it true. Part of Zach’s building despair had been the knowledge that taking Warren’s outstretched hand would be a form of suicide. Warren hadn’t actually wanted the parts of Zach that Zach valued. Warren hadn’t actually, Zach suspected, wanted Zach at all. He hadn’t not-wanted Zach, but Zach was an afterthought, a buy-one-get-one-free.

Zach was the easy door into their group. He’d never needed to keep anyone out before.

Zach closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, he gave all of his attention to following directions and getting them down safe. He even managed not to murder any trees.

He knew he should do something more than collapse over the steering wheel after turning off the engine. His part of their escape had been simple compared to everyone else’s, and there was still a lot he had to do.

When Will walked out of the cabin to greet them, Zach started to shake. They really weren’t going to have to do anything else alone. They could have. They would have. They just weren’t going to have to.


	6. Will: Strong Enough to Carry Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Tess Gallagher's "Black Pudding."
> 
> There are hints of PTSD in here.

**Sunday 4 December 2005**

Will had had time to work through to acceptance before the miracle of seeing bus 12 approaching. His parents were gone. His friends were gone. He had no idea what Gwen had done at Homecoming, just that the only people who came back after were the villains. 

He and Ron Wilson had gotten near the school before being forced down by an attack. The bus had lost a few important pieces, and they’d started to plummet. If Will hadn’t discovered that he could fly, they’d have ended up as smears on the pavement far below. He’d managed to get the bus to the ground. Then, they monitored communications. The other drivers-- the people who’d taken the buses after whatever Royal Pain did-- didn’t say much. They were transporting something for Gwen in multiple trips.

Given how it seemed to go, Ron said it had to be people.

Given Will’s parents and teachers and fellow students, Gwen and her allies had to have done something to those people. Mind control. Paralysis. Something.

Regression to infancy hadn’t ever occurred to him.

They’d gone to Layla’s parents. Will couldn’t think what else to do. Layla’s parents were watching the news reports about supervillain prison escapes in horror. The idea that Sky High might not be safe hadn’t yet occurred to them.

That was the point when Mr Williams started urging everyone they knew to go to ground. “Just not all in the same place,” he said. “Your family cabin might be secure, but we can’t afford to give them a single target.”

It was only later that Will realized that organizing that had let Mr Williams keep himself from falling apart over fear of what was happening to Layla. That urgency and focus had saved lives over the next week. Without him, quite a few people would still have been home when Barron Battle’s people came after them.

Will and Ron went to Will’s parents’-- Will’s-- cabin. A number of people came with them or stayed for a few days at a time later on. Not everyone had a bug out plan. Will only had one because his grandmother had thought it was important and because Mr Williams had updated everything from time to time.

Will’s mother had said that that was his way of coping with having been kidnapped too many times. Will’s father had called it ‘mostly harmless’ and then laughed.

Will’s parents were now, physically and mentally, about six months old. They weren’t going to remember Will as anything but one of the adults helping raise them. Will was having to process grief all over again.

He sat and watched Warren’s unconscious body while Zach and Ron tried to cope with two dozen babies and Ethan and Magenta tried to do something or another to make sure that trying to escape would make Warren sick. Magenta had said something about ‘combustion byproducts,’ and Ethan had said, “Poison smoke,” when Will looked puzzled. “He burns it; he breathes it; he gets too sick to move.”

Layla had gone to a clearing where she could get sun. Then she’d wrapped plants around herself in a way that Will was pretty sure meant she wasn’t getting any light at all. None of the others seemed to expect her back soon.

Will watched the rise and fall of Warren’s chest. He hoped he wasn’t going to have to fight Warren, not because Will wouldn’t win but because they’d probably destroy the public areas of the cabin, the parts that actually looked like a rustic family getaway home. Will’s mother had picked the furniture and the curtains and, well, everything. He didn’t have that much of her left now.

About half an hour after Will started watching him, Warren groaned and stirred. He moved his arms and legs then went completely still for about three seconds. He opened his eyes. “Stronghold.” He sounded like he’d had a cold for a week.

“Peace.” Will nodded an acknowledgement. His hands clenched. “I’m probably the last person who should be guarding you.”

Warren made a choking sound that Will didn’t identify as a laugh until it had gone on for several seconds. Then, he coughed. “Yeah, no. Really, no. You’ll punch me and probably beat the shit out of me, but you don’t hate me.”

It took Will a moment to realize that that meant that the others did hate Warren, that Warren knew they might do worse than beat the shit out of him. “You don’t sound as scared as you should be.”

Warren shrugged. “I lost.” He closed his eyes. “I’m learning how to handle it from having watched them.”

Will opened his mouth then thought the better of it. He gave it almost a minute before he said, “I’m glad you kept them at fourteen, but it was a damned stupid thing to do.”

“I had gotten that part, thanks.” Warren didn’t sound grateful. “They killed everyone. Everyone.” There was just a hint of horror in that. “I don’t know how, but they did.”

Will didn’t know either. None of his friends had mentioned anything beyond being absolutely sure that no one had followed them. “How many people?” He didn’t want to know, but he kind of had to.

“About sixty,” Warren said. “My father will say ‘I told you so.’” He sounded as if he really thought that he was going to see his father again. He didn’t sound very much as if he wanted to. “It looked like an explosion, like a bomb, but they said they couldn’t do that, not that way.”

“They couldn’t. Freshman classes, even hero track, don’t cover that. I mean… I suppose they could have found instructions in the library or something.” Will doubted it, and that came through in his words.

“None of them were ever in there alone.” Warren’s words were just a little plaintive.

“Ah.” Will thought about telling Warren that he was an idiot. “Small powers can move worlds.” It was something his grandmother had said frequently. Will’d thought about that over the last few weeks. Having big powers was a lot less useful than he’d thought it would be. His father had been wrong about that.

“Principal Powers managed to destroy the school database. I didn’t think it mattered that I didn’t know.”

“Magenta can shapeshift,” Will said. “She gets small.” Warren didn’t need to know more than that. Actually, Warren didn’t even need to know that much.

Warren went still again. “I’m surprised she didn’t murder me in my sleep. I… didn’t realize she was… Well.” He took a deep breath. “Okay if I sit up?”

Will considered that for a moment. “Better not.” He made it as detached as he could. “You can probably burn the room from there, but I’ll feel better if you stay on the floor.”

Warren nodded and didn’t open his eyes. “I don’t want to die,” he said softly, “but… If they want that--” He swallowed visibly. “I’d rather not die.”

Will thought that Warren was collapsing like a house of cards in a windstorm. He supposed that that would make a lot of things easier. “I’m not going to protect you.”

“I don’t think they want me dead,” Warren said. “If they did--”

If they did, Warren would have disappeared somewhere between Sky High and the cabin. No one but the quartet of escapees would have known that he’d ever been on the bus. Unlike Will, Warren probably wouldn’t have learned to fly on the way down.

Will wasn’t guarding Warren because he was as strong as Warren. Will was guarding Warren because Will probably wouldn’t hurt him. The fact that Will suspected that Warren might deserve pain made Will pretty certain that he wasn’t going to take the extra step and protect Warren. Not by saying ‘no’ to his friends, anyway. He’d watch, though. He was pretty sure none of them would torture Warren while Will was watching.

None of them would hurt Will that way.

It kind of explained why Layla had told him not to tell anyone that they had Warren, so Will seriously considered telling Layla’s parents-- or Zach’s-- anyway. Good people wouldn’t hurt a prisoner no matter what that prisoner had done, and he wanted his friends to keep that if they could. He didn’t think he’d stop them, but probably someone should.

Will had thought a bit about what ‘good’ actually meant in the face of murder. He was pretty sure none of them were going to be able to claim to be good, not in the long run. Nobody’d asked him to do much but run the cabin as a safehouse. Yet. He was fourteen and untrained. Will was pretty sure that, given his powers, the being fourteen was the more important part for the people planning the war.

They didn’t like calling it a war, but having lost so much so early had made it hard for Will to think it as anything else once Mr Williams had used the word.

Will was almost certain that Ron wouldn’t think to tell anyone about Warren. Ron had decided that he was some weird cross between being Will’s sidekick and being Will’s older brother, the person who made sure that Will didn’t live on Cheetos and popcorn and that someone did the laundry. It was kind of exhausting for Will, but Ron’s parents had wanted Ron tucked away safely and had specifically asked Will to keep him at the cabin.

A normal person with two superhero parents was too likely to end up kidnapped or murdered. Will was pretty sure that, if he were Ron, he’d want to think there was something useful he could do. He’d had weeks to think about it before he got his powers.

Will’d have let Ron stay anyway, but Ron’s parents had said, privately, that they would drop everything if Will called for help while Ron was staying there. They wouldn’t actually. All three of them knew that, but it was better than he’d get from anyone else.

The cabin’s defensive systems would stop a lot of things. Will had to trust that. Will probably wasn’t supposed to realize how far down the general list of priorities he was.

“If I protect you,” Will said, “it won’t be for you.”

“I know.” Warren didn’t move or say anything for about five minutes. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Do you even know what my mother looks like?”

Will had no idea why it mattered. He shook his head.

“There are still two or three pictures of her online, including one at the Paper Lantern website,” Warren said. “Watch out for her.”

Will wasn’t sure if that was a plea or a warning. 

Later, after Warren was locked in, Will saved off every image from the Paper Lantern website which was now only available via the Wayback Machine. Then he printed them all. He wasn’t actually sure what to do with them after that, and he really didn’t have anyone he could ask.

*****

When Will had a moment to think, he called Zach's parents. He thought about calling Layla's parents, too, but he didn't want to lie about her being okay. Mr Goldstein could call them; he wouldn’t be lying if he said he thought she was fine.

Also, Mrs Goldstein knew more about babies than Mr Williams did. Will could already tell that they were going to need more people in order to deal with the babies, so he was hoping she’d move in now that seeing him wouldn’t remind her of her grief for Zach. 

Mr Williams had urged her to do it back at the beginning. He’d pointed out that the younger two would be much safer at the cabin, but Mrs Goldstein broke into tears every time she talked to Will.

Magenta didn't want to send any of the babies away, and Will wasn't going to tell her they had to. Maybe someone else could.

Then again, twenty four babies needing care was a much better excuse for sending unpowered spouses with young children to the Stronghold cabin than one lonely fourteen year old with a lot of extra space had been. Very few supers had doubts that a war had started, but a lot of them still hesitated to send their families away.

Will’d simply been assuming that he was one atrocity away from having a gazillion seven year olds dumped on him. Ron was technically an adult and certainly conscientious and reliable. Ron would make sure that everybody had broccoli and liked it.

Mrs Goldstein came and brought Sarah and Naomi with her. Zach’s glow when she hugged him was visible even in full sunlight.

Having more people in the place made hiding Warren's presence harder, but the place had been designed to house multiple families. Will just locked that level entirely. He could get in. Ron could get in.

After thinking about it for a while, he gave Ethan access, too. One of his friends had to have it. After thinking a lot longer, he tweaked the house monitoring system so that that floor didn't exist. Any of the six of them could check the monitor in Warren's cell. Will sealed it to their thumbprints.

Will hated giving up the space, and Mr Williams was going to spot it the next time he visited, but Will didn’t want any curious kids letting Warren out. Also, if Mr Williams spotted it and asked, then Will wouldn’t have tattled. He hadn’t noticed when he visited a week after bus 12 landed, but he’d been kind of distracted by worrying about Layla.

Mr Williams was in Singapore now. Layla talked to him most nights.

Layla hadn’t come back inside for five days. Will had started worrying after the first twelve hours, but Magenta and Ethan wouldn’t let him go out to bring her inside.

“She’s not who she used to be,” Ethan told him softly. “None of us are, but she… stretched furthest. She knows what she needs right now. There’s probably a reason it looks like she’s in a chrysalis.”

After that, Will was really relieved that Layla came back looking like herself and that she didn’t seem more changed than his other friends did. That wasn’t saying that he really knew her now. He didn’t know any of them now. 

No, it wasn’t that. He knew them. He’d trust them with anything, with everything, and they still trusted him. They trusted him with Warren and with the truth-- some of the truth-- about what they’d been through. None of them had admitted to being responsible for the destruction of Sky High, but Will, like Warren, wasn’t quite prepared to think it was a coincidence.

Of the adults, only Ron actually knew that Sky High was gone.

None of them ever visited Warren or talked to him. It took Will a while to realize that they were afraid to. Any of them might hurt Warren. Or-- worse from their point of view-- start to like him again. All four of them, though, kept checking that Warren was where he was supposed to be, just only when they thought the others weren’t paying attention.

They also seemed to think that neither Will nor Ron had realized that only Magenta could sleep alone. The other three all had separate rooms. Officially. They just generally ended up in Layla’s room. 

 

**Wednesday 21 December 2005**

Sometimes, Magenta slept in Layla’s room. Sometimes, she didn’t. Sometimes, she stayed up all night, pacing the living room of the floor that the four of them shared with Ron and Will. When she did that, usually one of the other three ended up on the couch, watching her and not saying a word.

The fourth time it happened, Will sat up with her. Ethan had wandered in, watched for a while, nodded at Will, and then left.

Three hours later, Magenta said, “I hate who Warren made me be.”

Will wanted to say something, but he was almost sure it would be a mistake.

“Sometimes, I hate you, too,” Magenta said. “If you hadn’t ditched Layla at the Paper Lantern, she wouldn’t have met Warren.”

Will said, “I know.” He made the words an acceptance of guilt. She didn’t know about his deeper guilt over the Pacifier, and he wasn’t going to tell her because he was pretty sure it would hurt her. Telling her would make Will feel better, but Magenta would bleed over it. “I’m sorry. I should have been there.”

He wasn’t talking about the Paper Lantern.

Magenta nodded. “I don’t think it would have changed much.” She sat down on the far end of the couch.

“I still should have been there.” Will looked at his hands.

“Ron told me you tried. Warren… didn’t tell us that. He might not have known, but--”

“He probably didn’t know it was us,” Will told her, more because she seemed upset than because he wanted to defend anything that Warren had done. “If someone saw the bus number, they’d know it was Ron, but me? I don’t think whoever hit us could see me.”

“He said all he knew was that Gwen didn’t have you, he didn’t have you, and his father didn’t have you.” Magenta didn’t say anything for several seconds. “I was a little afraid his mother did, but then I thought that, if she did, she’d have used it against us.”

Will looked at her. “You met Warren’s mother?”

Magenta shook her head. “I just know that the people with Warren on Sky High were more scared of her than of Barron Battle.” She sighed. “And more scared of him than of Warren. We had to work around that.” She leaned back into the cushions. “I should have thought. Warren had a photograph of her. He told me it was her. We had… time to kill. If I’d thought to bring it, I could show you. She looks really ordinary, not like a mastermind or a monster.”

Which told Will that Magenta thought the woman was both. “He pointed it out?” Will wasn’t going to ask why Magenta had been in Warren’s room at a point when Warren was there and awake and not poisoned. He was also going to wait to ask her to look at the photographs from the Paper Lantern website. He suspected that her talking to him was more important right now.

Magenta’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah. I didn’t ask. Warren’s… I never had friends like the rest of you, but I also didn’t have-- He knew what he was doing with the people who were supposed to be his minions.They liked him, thought he had promise, usually forgot what he could do if he got angry because he didn’t let it out. He spent a lot of time playing for his audience. Him and me in his room wasn’t… Nothing happened, but we needed people to think it was.

“I offered that. The others don’t know.”

Will heard the implicit request, and he nodded.

“I not sure that it would have been any worse if we were fucking.”

Zach had mentioned that there’d been a sudden and ongoing influx of luxuries about two weeks into their imprisonment. He’d also mentioned that Warren's pressure tactics on him had shifted after they got CNN. At that point, Warren started discussing the news with him and actually listened to his opinions.

“He didn’t want anything real. I don’t know why. I probably would have because it would be so small a thing.”

Will wondered if it really would have been so small, but he nodded anyway. He looked at her for several seconds then looked away. “If you want to talk to him-- for any reason-- I’d let you in. I just… I thought you-- any of you-- should only do it if you’d really thought about it.”

She laughed, and the amount of bitterness in it surprised Will. He thought he should have known, but it still surprised him. “Oh, Will… I don’t-- I can’t-- Everyone would understand. Everyone would be horribly understanding.” Her hands clenched. “I _want_ to. I was going to be the sort of person who wouldn’t. You all gave me that. Then Warren--” She started to cry.

Will sat like a lump for several seconds. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “Maybe-- I don’t think it’s a one and done sort of thing.” He tried to sound gentle and hopeful, and he was pretty sure he was botching it. He wished one of the others was there.

But if she could have said this to one of them, she would have already. 

He really needed to make his requests for some sort of therapist who could help his friends _much_ more urgent. Most of the people with the clearance and the expertise simply weren’t available.

“You’re not going to forget,” Will said, “but you get to decide again tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. Decide who you want to be, I mean. It doesn’t have to look like who any of the rest of us are.” He sighed. He wanted very badly to hug her, but he thought that this was the sort of conversation that shouldn’t involve hugging. “I won’t tell anyone what you did--” He made it a promise. “--and I can’t imagine Zach, Layla, or Ethan doing it even if they knew. Warren… I haven’t told anyone he’s here. I don’t know if anyone will figure it out later, but we won’t let him tell anyone anything about you, either.”

If it came to that, Will suspected that something terrible and definitely accidental would happen to Warren. It might be a race to see which one of them got to it first, but it wouldn’t be Magenta. None of them would let her have to. Not again.

Will should probably make sure that Warren understood that. Before Mr Williams realized that there was a sub-level missing. Mr Williams would think that Magenta had done the right thing, but he might tell someone who didn’t.

Magenta was the only one who could have arranged for the bomb to go off. Even Will had eventually figured that out. She might or might not have built it-- Gwen having left it was more than possible-- but none of her fellow prisoners had had opportunity for something like that, and Gwen’s timing wouldn’t have been that precise, not after letting the bomb just sit there for so long. 

None of them were ever going to make her lie about it. If she wanted to tell them, that would be different. They wouldn’t ask her, and no one who didn’t talk to Warren was ever going to hear that they’d seen Sky High explode.

Magenta hadn’t killed anybody, not if she didn’t want them to know. They’d carry it if she needed help, but if she didn’t want them to know, then they wouldn’t.

If Warren ever asked Magenta about it, Will might find out how it felt to deliberately break bones. 

No, he probably wouldn’t. He’d want to, but he probably wouldn’t do more than threaten Warren. 

Layla, on the other hand… Warren was still very hesitant about eating or drinking anything that didn’t come sealed in plastic. He trusted the water from the tap and not much else.

Will thought that Warren trusting the tap water was simply desperation. Warren could last a lot longer without food than without water.

Will fixed his eyes on the far wall. “He’s afraid,” he told Magenta. “When I go in, there’s always a moment when he looks relieved that it’s only me.”

Magenta covered her face and took two shuddering breaths. “He knew he was hurting us.” Her voice broke a little. “It’s not because he made a mistake. I mean, he _did_ , but the hurting us part wasn’t that sort of mistake. None of it was accidental.”

Ethan and Zach had both said as much, so Will nodded. That Layla wouldn’t talk about it at all was even more telling.

Will tried not to visit Warren too soon after those conversations. Will didn’t want to confirm that he, himself, could be a torturer. “I don’t expect we’ll ever let him go.” Will hated the idea of spending the rest of his life taking Warren meals and making sure he had clean underwear, but Will couldn’t think of anyone else he’d trust to do it. He also couldn’t imagine circumstances under which letting Warren go would be safe.

Neither of them said anything for about ten minutes. Then, Will said, “You know… It’s okay to need them. Your friends, I mean.” He was Magenta’s friend, too, but he knew it would never be quite the same thing. “Nobody who wasn’t there is going to really get it. I’m very glad you’ve got each other.”

“Warren doesn’t have anyone.” Magenta’s words were without inflection. “I don’t think he ever did. That ought to make a difference to me, and it doesn’t.”

Will shrugged. “Tragic backstories don’t make decisions.” He hoped that Magenta would realize that it applied as much to her as to Warren. Will was pretty sure that Warren was starting to show cracks, but that was a thing he couldn’t talk about with anyone. He’d promised to keep Warren’s presence a secret, and he wasn’t prepared to ask Warren’s former prisoners to show him compassion. Ron… had many good qualities, but psychological subtlety was not among them.

“No.” Magenta nodded, but she sounded as if she wanted to argue. She hesitated. “I’m nearly sure-- I think his mother can fuck with minds.”

Ethan had told Will that, and it had made Will put extra screening security in place for anyone trying to get onto the Stronghold land. Magenta, though, was implying something worse. “You think--?”

“Pretty sure,” she said softly. “It’s not enough to stop me wanting an hour with him and a knife. Just-- some of the stupid things he did make more sense that way. The smart things, the cruel things, though, those were him. He could have chosen to be stupid there, too.” The anger in her voice felt like concentrated acid. “We were a coin he flipped. I don’t think either outcome would have broken his heart. If we’d failed, he’d have kept us alive, but he’d have known his mother was right about everything.”

Will couldn’t say anything for several seconds. “You didn’t fail,” he reminded her. “I don’t think he really thought you had a chance.” 

Warren had certainly stacked the deck pretty heavily against them. If he’d intended it as a test, he’d never meant it to be a fair one. The cracks Will was seeing in Warren’s psyche might not actually be as new as Will’d thought. Maybe Warren would be important enough to shake a therapist loose to come live at the Stronghold cabin.

Magenta shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not going to rescue the asshole who hurt us.”

No, she was asking Will to do it, and there wasn’t really a way to help Warren that didn’t involve telling other people that he was alive and imprisoned three floors down. 

He was certain that she knew that, too. Much as she hated Warren, she still had compassion enough to accept the risk. “Don’t ever let anyone convince you that you’re not a hero, Maj.” Will managed a genuine smile.

Her eyes widened. “Even with everything--?” She looked as if she was expecting rejection.

And as if rejection would break her. As if _Will’s_ rejection would break her. Because she still thought Will was a Good Person. Because Will hadn’t compromised or lost bits of himself, not like her or Ethan or Layla or Zach.

Will smiled at her. “Because of everything,” he told her. “It’s harder to keep putting one foot in front of the other while carrying this shit than it is to punch a hole in a concrete wall. I couldn’t do it. The carrying it, I mean. I’m pretty good at the punching through concrete part.”

“You’re sweet.” She didn’t sound as if she completely believed him even though every word he’d spoken was true. “Come here.” She waved a hand to beckon him closer.

Will moved to sit next to her then wrapped his arms around her. She laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. Will ended up holding her all night while she slept. He had no idea what she meant when she murmured, “Thank you for being real, Will,” but he understood the honor of being given her trust.

Whatever Warren’s story really was, he could rot forever without Will feeling a single twinge of conscience.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will's pretty certainly going to try to help Warren later on. Eventually. For right now, he and the others are fourteen year olds who have the judgment of, well, fourteen year olds and a lot of reasons for being angry and scared and for feeling like what they decide to do-- or not to do-- is entirely their own business.
> 
> Ron has his own reasons for not having taken steps yet.


	7. Warren: Where the Rose Should Grow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Emily Bronte's “Fall Leaves Fall.”
> 
> More discussion of Warren’s childhood and of how he views the world. The processing breaks in there are considerably more obvious than they were in previous chapters.

**January 2006**

Warren had wanted them to escape because, if they could do that at fourteen, they could certainly win the war he wasn’t fighting. He’d just been sure they couldn’t, so now, he wasn’t entirely sure they had. He hadn’t seen any of the four of them in a long time.

He’d thought about asking Will for paper and a pen, but he didn’t want his mother to find out about his diaries. If he had one when she rescued him, she’d know he must have had others.

But those were gone now because they’d been on Sky High. He might have had offsite backups. He should have had offsite backups. He remembered having those, might even be able to find them if he were free, but without a record in his hand to compare, he’d never be sure someone hadn’t fucked with the backups.

And nobody was going to set him free.

His parents had approved his plans for holding his almost-friends prisoner. His parents had said that any danger was unlikely as long as he kept them supervised when they went outside, as long as he never trusted them completely.

He should never trust anyone completely. Except his parents. No. Except his mother. His father… His father always wanted what his mother wanted.

Neither of his parents had actually trusted him. They hadn’t _distrusted_ him. Not yet. They just thought he was too young to know his mind, too young to understand consequences. They didn’t trust his self-control or his judgment. He’d worked pretty hard to make sure that their expectations didn’t get much higher.

They loved him almost as much as they loved each other. They’d give him anything.

Almost. And Warren wasn’t absolutely sure that his father still loved his mother at all. It wasn’t Barron Battle’s choice, either way, of course, so what Warren’s father wanted didn’t change anything.

Barron Battle had been in prison for a decade. He probably had more of his mind than Warren did. But he’d kept coming back to them every time even though he must have known he’d be caught.

Warren’s mother rewrote the reality of Warren’s memories any time a memory became inconvenient. She thought he hadn’t noticed or thought he didn’t mind or hadn’t even thought about it at all. Warren saw his memories through a prism, not the memories themselves but the spectrum they made moving through. He didn’t know which were the true light and which were distortions, and it didn’t matter anyway because his mother would change everything again later.

She’d have had fewer opportunities with Warren’s father, but Warren wondered, sometimes, if his father would understand the prism.

He didn’t think he’d seen his mother in a long time, but he couldn’t be sure because him running Sky High was the sort of thing she’d put in to patch a major excision of memory, He couldn’t think of a reason his mother would want him to think that Will Stronghold had locked him in, and he was almost sure that the memory of Magenta explaining exactly what he’d inhale if he tried to burn through the walls was real. 

He hadn’t been planning to try, even without that, but he supposed it would give him an excuse for not having tried. He’d need that later, when his parents found them.

His mother couldn’t read minds, so she wouldn’t know he was lying about planning to escape. As long as she didn’t ask directly. He’d have to answer if she did. She had to know what she was reaching for when she took things or changed things, so she sometimes did ask, but as long as Warren didn’t tell her, there was so very much that she’d never know.

It didn’t so much matter whose prisoner he was because, after his mother found him or let him out, if the memory hurt him, she’d change it to something better. He didn’t like the idea of losing that much time, but--

She loved him. She told him so. He loved her. She told him that, too.

He loved his quartet of sidekicks more than he loved his mother. He couldn’t save them from her, but even now, he wanted to. He was afraid of seeing any of them again, of how viciously angry they’d been, but he also missed them.

His mother told him stories about his past, things that maybe had happened or maybe hadn’t, things from before diaries and codes and the realization that there were always loopholes and that his mother would actually have to work in order to alter paper.

She hated working hard. Somebody else did the parts she found unpleasant, a constantly changing cast of someone elses, so that Warren wouldn’t get attached and so that no one would notice people suddenly dropping everything and not going back.

Warren suspected that taking two or three hours was a lot easier than managing a person long term. Cooking and cleaning and taking Warren for school supplies wasn’t as important as information and money and physical protection.

Her favorite story was about how she’d made him forget the existence of his teddy bear after he’d dropped it in a park one afternoon. His father had discovered it in the lost and found the next day and offered it back to him. Three year old Warren had been appalled to be presented with the dirty, smelly thing as if it was something he ought to value. Without the memories, he’d lost all of the connections between the thing and comfort.

Warren’s mother thought it was cute. Warren’s father thought it was funny. His parents had gotten him a new teddy bear and thrown the old one out. Warren supposed that his mother thinking the story was adorable was the reason why she was a supervillain. 

He loved her. He loved his father. He just didn’t know if it was his own idea. If he’d ever had his own idea even once.

No. He knew. Layla was his idea, her and Ethan and Zach and Magenta. Whatever the fuck he had been doing with Magenta. He remembered seeing death in her eyes. That was almost certainly a real memory. He hadn’t taken everything she’d offered, but he’d taken things that hurt more to lose than she’d thought they would.

He’d regretted her pain a little because he did like her, but he’d also liked that he could make all the decisions. He could have hurt her physically. He could have done anything at all. He hadn’t. He didn’t think he had, anyway.

He kind of wished that Magenta would visit. She’d hurt him, but that would be more honest than Will’s kindness and much more real than sitting and staring at the walls. If he remembered pain, it was pretty certainly his own memory, something that had actually happened.

Warren hoped that none of them would die. They hated him, but they’d been so much closer to real than anybody else but his mother. He thought he’d warned at least one of them about his mother. He hoped he had.

Maybe he should mention her again. He didn’t want to watch anyone die

Warren didn’t remember the first time he’d seen someone die, not because he hadn’t been old enough but because his mother had taken the memory from him. She’d left enough that he knew what had to have happened, but he didn’t remember the event. 

She called that a kindness.

He remembered that he’d cried, that he’d been frightened after, but nothing he remembered was necessarily true. Gaps in his recollection might hide anything at all. Any impulse he had, any attachment, might be something his mother had done to him. 

When he’d been older, he’d seen other people die. He’d even killed. His mother considered murder a necessary skill and didn’t want him to hesitate when he needed to use his powers.

He wasn’t sure which of his early friends had been real and which were ghosts his mother had given him. She hadn’t wanted him to be lonely, and real people couldn’t ever be trusted. She did love him. She wanted him to be safe. 

She was going to give him the world. She said so.

He would have it when she was done. That he didn’t particularly want it mattered not at all.

Warren wasn’t sure when he’d realized that nothing was permanent. It was a creepy feeling, a horrifying one, but also liberating. His life had save points. He’d play the best he could and figure out the rules because he didn’t like it when he felt the gaps in his head. Some things mattered enough to hold onto, so he’d learned to act. If his mother didn’t know, she couldn’t steal his experiences from him.

At nine, he’d started keeping a diary, a paper diary, and hiding it. He wrote in code, too, using a very simple substitution at first but more complex systems as he figured out more about what made a code hard to break. 

The pattern that he saw from his diary was that she took less away from him when he obeyed her or foresaw what she’d want and gave it to her. She also took less as he got older, but the things she took became more important. The walls and compulsions she put into his head got more complicated, too, as if she was realizing that she had a shortening window for making him what she wanted.

She’d taken his first kiss. Twice. She’d taken the small savings account he’d persuaded his neighbor, the one he checked in with after school, to help him set up. He’d been twelve and had had dreams of acquiring and saving enough money to run.

His mother had taken the neighbor, too. The obituary said ‘heart attack.’ It probably had been. There were a lot of ways to cause heart attacks.

Either his mother never found the diary or she thought it didn’t matter that he knew. Maybe she knew how much knowing made him want to please her. His third first kiss, after all, had been with someone of whom she approved, with someone who could be useful later, with someone who wanted to please Warren’s mother.

Warren couldn’t remember now if that had been the boy or one of the two girls. The kiss hadn’t been what mattered at that point.

Somewhere between starting the diary and the night of Homecoming, Warren had realized that part of his mother taking less was her expectation that he’d learn from his experiences and that he was now powerful enough to be useful instead of being a liability. The time she’d invested in him was starting to pay off.

The space between being a burden on his mother and being a threat to her was still too narrow for survival. She knew he was broken. She didn’t understand that she’d inflicted most of the damage.

If she ever had other children, she wouldn’t raise them herself. She’d let someone else do the work and then swoop in and rework the child from the ground up when they were two or three years younger than Warren was now. She’d had a lot of practice altering adult minds. It was easier.

How long since he’d seen his mother? Everything back to that was still real. Probably. Everything back to a week before Homecoming. Some things before that, too, because Homecoming and after made sense with those memories. She’d had to travel to prepare for the prison breaks.

But he couldn’t be sure. He didn’t have his diaries any more. They’d been destroyed with Sky High. He grieved for the diaries more than he did for the people killed. His horror over the deaths had more to do with understanding that he had pushed the kids he liked, kids who were supposed to be _good_ to desperation than it did with the deaths.

And part of him admitted that it was smart in a very cold way. The timing of the explosion created uncertainty about his survival, their survival, anyone at all having survived. A lot depended on whether or not any of the spies had actually told his parents that he was being abducted and that the bus had taken off.

At any rate, Layla, Zach, Ethan, and Magenta had been real. Him locking them in a concrete hole had been real, too. He hadn’t seen another way to keep them, and he didn’t want them to become ghosts in his head, not even when they hurt him.

Why didn’t they visit? He was afraid they would, but he also… He missed them.

He hadn’t seen them for a while, so they might not be real any more. They might have died or evaporated or something. He thought they probably were alive, though, because he kept seeing Will, kept talking to Will. To Will and to some guy named Ron who was Will’s friend or cousin or something. Warren hadn’t paid attention when Will introduced him because Warren had been focused on Will and had still been sick from what Layla’d given him.

If Warren asked now, someone might guess that Warren had holes in his head. Bad things happened to people who noticed that, and Warren thought he might actually like Will and Ron.

Neither of them much liked him, but Will brought him food and soap. Ron brought him jigsaw puzzles and clean clothes. Neither of them had to. No one out there was going to know if Warren died.

If they stopped bringing him food, would he starve or would he burn the walls to poison himself?

His mother had offered to visit Sky High, had offered to ‘spend a little time’ with each of his prisoners. She said that it would be nice for Warren to have people his own age who really wanted to make him happy. His father had asked if either girl was attractive and then laughed when Warren’s mother pointed out that the boys might be attractive, too.

Warren’s mother could have made all four of them his slaves. It would have taken her time, but she’d also mentioned the idea of grandchildren and gone on to say she wasn’t convinced that these girls were good prospects for that as they were both very young and only sidekicks. Then she’d smiled and said, “But if you like them, that’s what matters.”

Warren had said no. He’d rather they hate him than that he have to see them with pieces missing. Of course, if he’d let her do it, he’d still have Sky High. He wouldn’t be trapped and depending Will Stronghold being kind.

It said something that he’d rather be here than back in his bedroom in the apartment he’d shared with his mother.

He was afraid of what his mother might take from him now. After Homecoming, once Sky High became his, he had weeks that were-- might be-- probably were-- real. He’d eaten terrible food and learned things and gotten drunk. The people around him had had names.

Had had. Warren’s mother wouldn’t let him remember people he’d known dying, not when he showed any signs of regret or mourning, and taking away the explosion would have been easier than taking the weeks before it. 

Maybe she wouldn’t be able to take any of it now. The longer he kept a memory, the harder it was for her to remove it. Even if she got most of a months old memory, he could reconstruct parts of it based on what bits were obviously broken. 

A new memory didn’t have so many anchors, so he hoped she took a long time finding him.

Maybe she wouldn’t take everything anyway. It wouldn’t be a lesson if Warren didn’t remember what had gone wrong. And, possibly, his father would think that keeping Warren’s used-to-be friends around after was still a good idea. Barron Battle enjoyed having people fear him. He thought Warren would learn to.

Warren wondered how much his father understood about the things Warren had learned from his mother. Warren’s father seemed to think that Warren obeyed out of loyalty and love.

Not that Warren didn’t. He’d just have had to obey anyway. He was pretty sure that the only way to escape that was for his mother to die.

He didn’t hope that she would. He absolutely didn’t. He loved his mother, and she cherished him.

He just wondered what his childhood would have been like if his father had been there for more of it. Not that there was any point to what ifs. His father had spent most of the last decade in prison with only a few, brief escapes. If he hadn’t been in prison, Barron Battle would have been Warren’s mother’s puppet.

No one Warren had ever met, including his father, would believe in a world where Barron Battle was the good parent.

Warren’s mother said that it was because Jetstream was watching, that it was because Warren’s mother couldn’t touch Jetstream’s mind. The Commander would believe Jetstream over the evidence of his own memories and his own senses. Other people believed the Commander. Warren’s mother had had to rely on acting and misdirection to keep Jetstream from realizing that she was Warren’s father’s partner in villainy.

Warren thought that it hadn’t been that Jetstream didn’t realize. It had been that Jetstream couldn’t prove even the smallest bit of it. Jetstream was a hero, so she watched and waited for the inevitable proof that she was right.

Jetstream always came with the Commander when Warren’s father escaped. Warren had never thought she looked terrible enough or powerful enough to explain his mother’s fear of her. She was only one person, and he’d seen her bleed.

Warren had told his parents that he’d lost track of the babies that had been the Commander and Jetstream, that he assumed Royal Pain had taken them. He was pretty sure that his mother suspected him of lying, but she hadn’t considered it urgent enough to travel to Sky High to check. The babies weren’t going anywhere.

He had been almost certain that, by the time his mother got around figuring out which babies she was after, assuming she ever did, she’d have realized that Warren wasn’t protecting Jetstream out of any sort of sentimental weakness. Even if she didn’t let Warren keep Jetstream and the Commander, it would have distracted her from his actual sentimental weakness-- the four sidekicks locked inside the girls’ locker room.

He’d hidden Jetstream under Principal Powers’ name. He’d hidden the Commander under Coach Boomer’s. He’d changed all of the names, so Coach Boomer was someone else entirely. He was pretty sure he’d told Will Stronghold that part. Hiding it from Will would have gotten Warren nothing, and revealing it might buy as much protection as he’d given Will’s parents.

Or not. Will might not have understood that there had been something to be protected from.

Warren had never been sure what he’d say to his mother if she asked him why. He’d say something, of course, because he had to. The sidekicks could be called a whim. Jetstream couldn’t. Jetstream mattered.

Warren didn’t need weapons against his parents. He really didn’t.

All of the babies were at least a decade and a half from being useful. They’d need a lot of care in between the current moment and then. But, at that point, Warren would be thirty. That was old, but it wasn’t really, really old. Warren’s parents were both older than that already. When Warren was thirty, his mother would be fifty. 

But she might not like being reminded that she was getting older. He’d learned not to point out that she’d already outlived every previous documented person with a power like hers. She’d taken that information from him more than once when he was young enough to let her know that he knew.

He didn’t want her dead.

Maybe one of his captors would kill her for him. Magenta was ruthless enough. Will and Layla were powerful enough. Ethan and Zach would both see the need. Then, they’d actually be safe. Then Warren would be safe.

Maybe they’d killed her already and just not told him? No. That was too dangerous a thought, even in the depths of his mind. It was too close to wanting his mother dead.

Which he didn’t.

If they didn’t manage killing her, he was still his mother’s beloved son. He’d survive. He wouldn’t be able to protect anyone else, but he’d survive.

There was a coin still spinning in the air. Eventually, he’d find out how it landed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't currently plan to continue this branch of the series. The other stories I've already written diverge during the escape attempt and explore what might have happened if it failed. Things not altered by that are still true for this branch but either haven't come out yet or haven't impinged on the characters yet.
> 
> If I do something further in this branch, it will probably start with Ron Wilson. Once I've posted the other currently completed stories, you'll understand why.


End file.
